Series of minor questions about OpenPGP 2

[David Shaw]

On Jan 27, 2009, at 10:02 AM, vedaal at hush.com wrote:

>> Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:31:39 -0500
>> From: David Shaw <dshaw at jabberwocky.com>
>> Subject: Re: Series of minor questions about OpenPGP 1
>
>> Old programs will basically blow up if they see something they
>> don't
>> understand.  There is a special packet, the Marker Packet (tag 10)
>> which basically exists to make PGP 2.x print out "You need a newer
>> version of PGP" before PGP 2.x would blow up.
>
>
> on this note,
> i was recently playing with a 64 bit vista laptop,
> and couldn't get my portable pgp 2.x to initiate.
> (Disastry's version)
> the dos pgp window command line just opened and immediately closed
>
> i was using the 16 bit dos build,
> and didn't switch yet to the 32 bit win build
>
> how does gnupg manage to maintain 16, 32, 64 bit
> hardware independence?

The magic of autoconf and careful programming.  When you run the  
configure script when building GPG, it figures out what the sizes of  
various items are in your system.  The code is written to do the right  
thing and adapt to these sizes.

GPG doesn't run on a Windows 16-bit system, though.  That's ancient.

David