pgpcontrol 2.6

This is the legacy bundle of Usenet control message signing and verification tools, distributed primarily via ftp.isc.org (which hasn't updated yet as I write this). You can see the files for the current release at archives.eyrie.org.

This release adds support for using gpg for signature verification, provided by Thomas Hochstein, since gpgv may no longer support insecure digest algorithms.

Honestly, all the Perl Usenet control message code I maintain is a mess and needs some serious investment in effort, along with a major migration for the Big Eight signing key (and probably the signing key for various other archives). A lot of this stuff hasn't changed substantially in something like 20 years now, still supports software that no one has used in eons (like the PGP 2.6.3i release), doesn't use modern coding idioms, doesn't have a working test suite any longer, and is full of duplicate code to mess about with temporary files to generate signatures.

The formal protocol specification is also a pretty old and scanty description from the original project, and really should be a proper RFC.

I keep wanting to work on this, and keep not clearing the time to start properly and do a decent job of it, since it's a relatively large effort. But this could all be so much better, and I could then unify about four different software distributions I currently maintain, or at least layer them properly, and have something that would have a modern test suite and could be packaged properly. And then I could start a migration for the Big Eight signing key, which has been needed for quite some time.

Not sure when I'm going to do this, though, since it's several days of work to really get started. Maybe my next vacation?

(Alternately, I could just switch everything over to Julien's Python code. But I have a bunch of software already written in Perl of which the control message processing is just a component, so it would be easier to have a good Perl implementation.)