What is this PGP Zip thing? Is it related to PGP's
Partioned Encrypted Format?

It's not clear from the original mail if this is what he is referring to, but PGP Zip is a new feature in PGP that is an encrypted compressed archive.

If PGP Zip is the same thing they were calling the "PGP Archive" before, it's actually a tar file that is processed in the usual 2440 way.

From: Sunil Kumar T K <sunil@cks.in>
To: bug-any@bugs.gnupg.org
Cc: gnupg-hackers@gnupg.org, gnats-admin@trithemius.gnupg.org,
dshaw@jabberwocky.com, sunil@ict4d.info
Subject: Re: gnupg/483
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:40:14 +0530

The issue of incompatibility that i was refering to is with PGP desktop
version 9.0

Actually i had a very bad time working out the compatibilities of these
two with each other,

BTW i am using GPG with Enigmail on my thunderbird.

now that i have gone through all that - i can tell you
the diffrences -

1.) Yes you are correct the PGP 9.0 - PGP Zip is actually a tar file
thats processed in the usual way.

= but the issue here is that GPG doesnt have a file compression or

file encryption module which will be very nice to have from a users
(My) perspective. [or atleast i dont know how to use it.]

2.) GPG mail attachments which uses PGP/MIME can not decrypted by PGP 9.0

I dont understand the diffrences bwtn using a MIME and not using

one while encrypting.

as a open s/w i strongly belive that GPG should be compleately
compatible with all PGP distributions.

Some desktop s/w like a PGP desktop which can encrypt all mails and help
in encrypting files would also be
a wonderfull thing to have.. so that i dont have to look for and install
diffrent s/w like Enigmail for each and every mail clients like outlook
or eudora.

luv,
sunil

dshaw@jabberwocky.com wrote:

Synopsis: incompatibility with PGP desktop 9.0

• Comment added by dshaw on Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:52:36 +0200 **** It's not clear from the original mail if this is what he is referring to, but PGP Zip is a new feature in PGP that is an encrypted compressed archive.

If PGP Zip is the same thing they were calling the "PGP Archive" before, it's actually a tar file that is processed in the usual 2440 way.

Thanks & Regards,

Sunil Kumar T K
Technology Officer

From: Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org>
To: bug-any@bugs.gnupg.org
Cc:
Subject: Re: gnupg/483
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 09:43:20 +0200

1.) Yes you are correct the PGP 9.0 - PGP Zip is actually a tar file
thats processed in the usual way.

= but the issue here is that GPG doesnt have a file compression or

file encryption module which will be very nice to have from a users
(My) perspective. [or atleast i dont know how to use it.]

Being a Unix tool by nature gpg won't implement any archive features.
For good reasons this has to be done by a separate process (cf. KISS
principle).

2.) GPG mail attachments which uses PGP/MIME can not decrypted by PGP 9.0

I dont understand the diffrences bwtn using a MIME and not using

one while encrypting.

PGP/MIME is not a gpg issue but a MUA issue. Almost all MUAs nowadays
can do this and it is the Right Thing to do. The exceptions are the
notorious Outlook and Lotus mailers. In a couple of month we might
have a 90% solution for Outlook, though (not part of gpg of course).

as a open s/w i strongly belive that GPG should be compleately
compatible with all PGP distributions.

We are compatible with the OpenPGP standard but we don't want to do
all things PGP does. Under Windows it is common to put all kind of
feature crap into a program (or in a closely interconnected set of
COMs). This is not the Unix way.

When PGP came out with this feature (it's actually a ported feature from their command line product),
I actually looked around for a tar library that we might use. Nothing was usable or portable enough. One of these days, I'll write a shell script that does "tar -xxxxx | gpg -xxxxx" with appropriate options.