Partial ECPP certificates

[Andreas Enge <andreas.enge@inria.fr>]

Hello,

someone using my CM code to create ECPP certificates was wondering whether
there was an error somewhere in the middle of the as yet unfinished
computation. I considered using GP and primecertisvalid, but the only
output is a 0 or a 1, even when cranking up the debug level.

So I am wondering whether you would consider adding more information to
the output to distinguish between a correct, but only partial certificate
and a real mistake. One possibility would be an optional flag "partial"
with default 0; if set to 1, primecertisvalid would return 1 for a
correct partial certificate. I think this would be well in line with the
option to create partial certificates by primecert.

And/or higher debug levels could output some information on the different
steps and print in which certificate entry there is an error.

I also noticed that primecert will happily "complete" a partial
certificate with an error in it. This is a valid choice ("garbage in,
garbage out"), but it would be more convincing if a means of checking
a partial certificate were implemented.

What do you think?

Andreas