Hi list,
OK, so I thought it was time to create a mailing list about the Wotsap .wot updates. I took the liberty to subscribe those I beleive can be interested: Patrick, Henk and Thomas. If you know more people that may be interested, ask them to subscribe at http://lists.lysator.liu.se/mailman/listinfo/wotsap-updates . -users and -dev lists are on their way too. I will get info up on the web pages soon.
Anyway, what triggers the creation of the mailing list today is the upgrade to .wot fileformat 0.2. The main purpose of the new file format is to include information about signature types, and a small change was made at the same time to make the signature list somewhat easier to parse with low-level languages.
A specification for the new file format can be found at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jc/wotsap/wotfileformat-0.2.txt
If you find bugs or typos, please tell me.
Due to some test runs, the new file version was used for 2004-11-05.wot. I have now renamed that file and repointed the latest.wot symlink to 2004-11-04.wot. The 0.2 file is however great as an example file, and is now available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jc/wotsap/wots/2004-11-05.fileversion0.2.wot .
With the specification, the example file and the mailing list you should be able to implement support for the new file format everywhere needed, I hope. I'd like to suggest that we keep updates in the 0.1 format up to and including 2004-11-30.wot, and let 2004-12-01.wot be in the 0.2 format. Is this OK with everyone?
To summarize the changes:
- The signatures file is changed. It now includes a signature type in the 4 most significant bits, and instead of lists being INDEX INDEX INDEX 0xFFFFFFFF they are now 4 type+INDEX type+INDEX type+INDEX type+INDEX
- A debug file is included in the .wot file.
- GnuPG instead of pksclient is now used to parse and validate the keys. This is needed to get the signature type, but also removes invalid keys and gives us the primary UID instead of just a random(?) one. Because some invalid keys and signatures are removed, the size of the web of trust will shrink on 2004-12-01.
This is meant to be a discussion list, not an announce list. Discuss :)
Jörgen