Question about history of hash and cipher collections

[Kevin Hilton]

I dont have any feelings or objections about any of the ciphers or
hashes included or excluded (ok maybe serpent should be included),
however I can imagine that deleting old ciphers and hashes would cause
a problem with backwards compatibility.  Why md5 and cast5 are still
included is beyond me, other than for backwards compatibility.

Lastly, who is this governing body that decides what algorithms should
be included? The IETF OpenPGP group?  As a regular user of gpg, but
novice when it comes to the history of PGP/GPG this discussion on the
history/politics of GPG/PGP has been very interesting for me.