Question about history of hash and cipher collections

[Robert J. Hansen]

Kevin Hilton wrote:
> Whatever happened to the tiger hash??

The OpenPGP Working Group decided that it didn't bring anything new to 
the table, especially in light of SHA256 and SHA512.

Strong arguments (IMO, very strong!) can be made that OpenPGP supports 
way too many algorithms.  Even with as many algorithms as OpenPGP 
supports, though, the line still has to be drawn somewhere.

> Lastly, do you know the reason that the serpent cipher algorithm never
> made it into gpg.

Yes.  It never made it into the OpenPGP RFC (RFC2440 and later RFC4880). 
  If the WG had decided to include Serpent, GnuPG would support Serpent.

>  From the NSA competition, I thought the serpent
> algorithm came in second

There was no second place finisher.  AES won, and everyone else was an 
also-ran.