Subject: New 'User Attribute Packet' subpacket - Property Subpacket (type 3)

From: David Srbecky <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 14:22:38 +0200

Follow-up to post: "The OpenPGP mail and news header" extenssion

Hello,

There are a lot of little attributes we may want to store with the 
public key. For example:

1 - supports MIME format
2 - supports inline format
3 - supports header format
4 - preferred format
5 - prefers signed mail
6 - prefers encrypted mail
7 - public key url
etc...

There are two approaches I would like to suggest which could solve this:

  - We can assign a subpacket for every such attribute

  - We can create specific subpacket to hold theses attributes:

Property Subpacket (type 3)
-------------------------------------
Subpacket specific data:
    id - identifier - eg. 1
    data - depends on id - eg. true

The advantage of this approach is that one relatively unimportant 
attribute will not consume whole 'User Attribute Packet' subpacket. 
Also, it should make deprecating/updating easier since all these 
attributes are members of one subpacket type.

I really can not decide which approach is better.

'Property Subpacket' does not really describe the purpose of the 
subpacket, but I could not find any better name. Any suggestions?

Regards,
David Srbecky