Hi Martin,

Thank you very much for this information, Martin.   The key was:

>     BTW, the oid that you mention [..]
>     id-dsa-with-sha1 seems to be used for actual DSS signatures, not for
DSA public keys"

and thus it is the DER encoding I need.  it's crystal. :)    I was to page 6
and though it is dense reading, it's also very interesting.  There are lots
of new terms to really absorb like message digest, signature, etc..

From: "Martin Kobetic" <kobetic at rogers.com>
> > I completely agree that this would be a _very_ useful open-source
project.  Any
> > chance of Cincom donating your work in X509 and ASN.1?   We could put it
in the
> > Goodies category of SqueakMap!  ;-)
>
> I don't think anybody on the developement team would mind that, and the
thoughts to pursue it  come up from time to time. But it's
> not happening for various reasons that I can't get into. I don't think
it's completely unlikely to happen, I'm just worried that it
> might be too late when it actually comes to that.

I guess they don't buy the tidal argument.   From where I'm sitting, VW is
the thoroughbred and any high volume system is going to use VW.   There is
high volume to be had in squeak.

> On the other hand X509 in VW still needs a lot of work, it has just barely
enough to get SSL going. Interestingly we've got 3
> independent ASN.1 attempts though. X509 itself uses it's own fairly
simplicistic ANS.1/DER decoder, then there's a preview of a
> general ASN.1 framework, and finally there's an SNMP optimized framework
in Opentalk/SNMP. I hope that we will migrate X509 over to
> the generic ASN.1 framework sometimes soon. The SNMP version is likely to
live a life of its own for a while, unless we'll suddenly
> have copious amounts of spare time to spend distilling the best out of
those two implementations.

well, why not a fourth, then!  they call it product differentiation don't
they?   "all benefit when sharing, only the few when hoarding, and then
comes the drought"

VW7 is a *really* fantastic piece of work and I really enjoy working in it
(with the squeak accelerators installed, of course :).  I was sad to see I
couldn't get an interview after repeated attempts in the Castle Microsloth.
I keep going for an espresso.

cheers,
robert