Partial body length encoding for Compressed packets

[David Shaw]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 02:06:53PM -0500, Hasnain Mujtaba wrote:
> But PGP2 does support partial body length encoding! Using the --pgp2
> option when encrypting, I can see that GPG uses PBL encoding for both
> encrypted and literal data packets, but not for compressesd. I must be
> totally wacko, but I don't get it. Why would GPG generate PBL encoded
> packets for PGP2? 

PGP2 does not support partial body length packets.  GnuPG is forced to
use PBL encoding if it does not know the length of a message (say, if
you're encrypting stdin or something with no clear size).  In that
case, regardless of the --pgp2 flag, PGP2 will not be able to decrypt
it.

David