[GNU Crypto] Updated Keyring spec

[Casey Marshall]

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Hi.

After a bit of pondering, I've made some changes to the in-progress
keyring spec <http://metastatic.org/text/gnu-keyring.txt>. To summarize:

  * Keyring sequences have been removed. This was a kludge from the very
    beginning, and was addressing something that wasn't really a
    problem.

  * The document now only describes two forms of keyring -- one for
    trusted certificates, one for personal credentials (public and
    private key pairs, personal certificates). The spec is actually left
    open on this -- i.e. it is possible to create keyrings that can
    contain different data, but the two defined in the spec are
    REQUIRED.

  * The alias field is gone, replaced by a mandatory property called
    "alias" in all primitive types.

  * Envelope types are required to have an "alias-list" property, which
    lists all contained aliases.

  * ENCRYPTED and AUTHENTICATED packets (i.e. non PBE ones) are now
    marked as OPTIONAL. All other packet types are REQUIRED.

Also, I'd like to pose some more questions:

  * Why not have sequences of packets (such as those contained in
    envelopes) end with an end-of-sequence marker, and remove the
    requirement of having the length preceed the contained packets? This
    would make encoding easier, since you do not need to know the
    encoded length of the objects you are writing beforehand.

Cheers,

- -- 
Casey Marshall || address@hidden
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