Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!altnet!edc
From: edc@ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Crypt() in Elm - This may be a problem!
Keywords: crypt elm international
Message-ID: <485@altnet.ALTOS.COM>
Date: 20 Jun 88 08:30:29 GMT
References: <470@altnet.ALTOS.COM> <278@clout.Jhereg.MN.ORG>
Reply-To: edc@altnet.ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen)
Organization: Altos Computer Systems, San Jose, CA.
Lines: 35

In article <278@clout.Jhereg.MN.ORG> mark@clout.Jhereg.MN.ORG (Mark H. Colburn) writes:
>
>Hmmmm.  The last time I looked, I thought that all versions of Unix
>were supplied with a crypt command.  It is just that there is one
>version made for use in the U.S., and another which is distributed
>abroad.  Therefore there are crypt libraries on all systems, but they
>may be incompatible.  Is this correct?

It is true that some UNIX vendors have a "quasi-crypt" that they supply to
international customers, but many do not. You are correct that the      
quasi-crypt is incompatible with the real crypt, and this poses a big problem
for elm.
 
>This would still cause a problem if you were attempting to send
>crypted mail to someone who has an incompatible crypt, so I support
>Eric's idea of using a PD version of crypt rather than relying on the
>potentially different versions of crypt that are distributed with the
>system.

I propese that we select a fairly stable PD crypt which we can build into the
Elm sources. That way "Elm is Elm" no matter where you are. 

I am currently evaluating several crypts for this purpose. If anyone has any
suggestions, or a favorite quasi-crypt function, I'd love to hear from you.

I'll post my findings and proposal later this week.
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