Re: Line termination philosophy [Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-secsh-publickeyfile-08.txt]

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

der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost> squeeked:

>And that is why I think that aspect should be fixed: it unreasonably and
>unnecessarily constrains implementations.

There's a simple way to solve this debate.

Is anyone on this list (which seems to include most SSH implementors) going to
have their SSH implementation inconvenienced by the current text?  That is,
does it affect any real SSH implementation?  If it directly affects your code,
please let us know.

(As I've already mentioned, my code runs on OSes that optionally have record-
style files, and one that AFAIK only has record-style files, and I'm not
inconvenienced in any way, the spec is fine for me).

>It prompted me to go read 2822 and 2045 with this in mind, and I am surprised
>and discouraged to find that those specs do include such specification and
>that when they are supposedly applied to local storage, they have thus been
>(almost universally, in my experience) "implemented" by ignoring their line-
>termination aspects.  Most such implementations are therefore not
>implementations of those specs at all, but rather of closely related specs,
>never formally codified, which use OS-native conventions for representing
>line boundaries.

"Gee, look at all these specs and implementations (many of which have been
around for years), they're all interpreting them incorrectly except for me".

Peter (who still can't believe we're actually debating something like this.
       It's trigraphs all over again).