PuTTY wish keyfile-diagnostic

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summary: Better diagnostics on failure to load private key file
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.
fixed-in: 2003-08-30 2cde290c772881f1e7ce9ee5901fa13ab8882ffe (0.54)

Currently some failures to load private key files (PPK) result in
messages like "Couldn't load private key".

These are failures such as hash/MAC verification and format errors,
which seems wrong. A better error reporting channel would be nice.

(NB that hash/MAC verification errors will only be visible as such for
passphraseless keys, since for encrypted keys tampering is
indistinguishable from an incorrect passphrase.)

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2016-12-27 11:40:22 +0000)