Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-secsh-publickeyfile-08.txt

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

>> If you want to provide a spec for encoding public keys as octet
>> streams containing sequences of lines delimited by line termination
>> sequences, that's fine, but that's (a) less useful (because it
>> requires converting between octet-stream representations and native
>> representations for filesystems that don't use line termination
>> sequences) and (b) not what publickeyfile-08 calls itself.
> Um, section 2 makes it fairly clear that the format described is for
> exchanging public keys between implementations, rather than
> necessarily for use within an implementation.  It could probably be
> clearer.

It's clear that's what motivated it.  It's not clear that it's intended
to be restricted to that.

I'm also not convinced that it makes any difference.  A text file is a
reasonable unit for interchange; there is no need to reduce it to an
octet sequence of defined contents.  After all, such interchange may
well be between implementations running on the same OS or even the same
machine.  While most storage mechanisms do reduce a text file to an
octet sequence at some point, that octet sequence does not need to fall
under the jurisdiction of the spec - nor would it be particularly
useful for it to do so.

>> Since the Header-tag is explicitly declared case-insensitive, I'd
>> prefer to see the case-sensitivity of the Header-value mentioned,
>> even if only with wording like "...more than 1024 bytes, and,
>> depending on the Header-tag, may or may not be case-sensitive.".
> I don't think case-sensitivity is a useful concept to apply to
> header-values in the abstract.

I do (see below).  Your I-D defines only two headers, though, and
neither of them is for routine automated consumption, so neither of
them really needs a case-sensitivity spec - though they need to be
case-preserved, it seems to me.

> To take an analogy, would you say that the RFC-822 "Subject" header
> is case-sensitive or not?

Since Subject: is an unstructured header field, I'm not sure it is
useful in that case.  But as an abstract concept it is useful; consider
Content-Transfer-Encoding:, which is defined to be case-insensitive.

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