Re: existing work on TODO items

[Dave Love]

"Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:

> pgg was already in Emacs, so we decided to make other parts of Emacs
> use it.  That is clearly an improvement.
>
> I do not know much about that area, so I do not know how much pgg
> differs from the general facility in TODO.  Maybe pgg IS that general
> facility.  Is it?

Sort of.  It provides basic encryption support that the TODO item on
encryption referred to, though I didn't use much of it.  (At least I
think it referred to pgg at that time, but maybe it was something pgg
replaced.)

What I meant by `general facility' was file-handler-based encryption
of files, i.e. something not tied to a specific package like Allout.

Note, however, that the basic PGG code will lose data in some
circumstances with non-ASCII characters as far as I can tell.  (I
don't know whether my reply about that got through.)  Then I noticed
that even with ASCII data, if you use M-x pgg-encrypt-region followed
by M-x pgg-decrypt-region on the result, it fails with:

  [GNUPG:] NODATA 2
  gpg: decrypt_message failed: eof
  
  gpg exited abnormally: '2'