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

[pgut001%cs.auckland.ac.nz@localhost (Peter Gutmann)]

Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz%cmu.edu@localhost> writes:

>On the contrary, this document essentially specifies a wire format for the
>interchange of SSH public keys.  As such, it MUST specify details like line
>termination.  Otherwise it is underspecified, and it may not be possible to
>create interoperable implementations.

This is just getting silly... no, more than that, it's ridiculously pedantic.
Yes, it is in theory possible to find a record-oriented system that doesn't
support flat text files.  However, if anyone were ever to port SSH to CICS,
I'm sure they could write a special profile for it that would allow it to
interoperate with all the other CICS implementations of SSH.  In the meantime
since MIME, PGP, XML, and a million other flat-text formats have somehow
managed to struggle by without worrying about this, why is it a concern here?
The coverage of the flat-text format in the spec seems perfectly clear and
completely adequate to me, I'd suggest that if anyone feels the need to add 20
pages of additional wording explaining to readers what a text file is, they
may prefer another line of work.  Writing ETSI PKI standards springs to mind.

Peter :-).