Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: mail headers
Message-ID: <1989Apr24.203137.5835@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <248.244422A4@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us> <636@dtscp1.UUCP> <1628@ccnysci.UUCP> <641@dtscp1.UUCP> <WEENING.89Apr19185059@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 89 20:31:37 GMT

In article <WEENING.89Apr19185059@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU> weening@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU (Joe Weening) writes:
>One has to recognize that the Internet and its protocols have become
>dominant, and are supplanting any "standards" that ever existed in the
>UUCP world...

It depends on what you mean by "supplanting"; if you measure it by counting
systems, I think you might be surprised.  The trend is clearly that way,
but the uucp world has a huge head start in sheer number of machines.

> [from earlier posting]
>	   From mail-agent date
>	   >From mail-agent date remote from b
>	   >From mail-agent date remote from a
>	   >From my-userid date remote from my-machine
>
>   It has almost the same information as the Received lines and each machine
>   would produce the "postmark" and append the mail to it before passing
>   it along without having to go in and edit the headers.  Also, from this
>   I can write a function that will recreate the return path since this
>   is consistant and many of the Received lines I have seen are not.  It is
>   also less verbose and less cumbersome.  Now would someone please tell
>   me (without flames) why this is no good?

It's not that it's no good, it's just that it's different.  The situation
isn't helped by a lot of Unix software that tries to smush the two
conventions together rather than converting between them at gateways.
(Thanks, Berkeley. :-[)  Given the Internet's political backing, its
way of doing things is, perhaps unfortunately, increasingly dominant.

>... So in return for all of the extra connectivity you now
>have compared to the "good old days" of V7, you are going to have to
>accept some of the things that make life easier for us Internet folks.

And of course, you Internet folks wouldn't even *consider* accepting some
of the things that make life easier for us uucp folks, in return for all
the extra connectivity *you* now have, even though we are (by some measures
at least) the larger community.  Heavens no.  We all know that the Internet
is divinely ordained, and all others are inferior heathens.  The fact that
the Internet is the smaller of the two groups is totally irrelevant, because
the Internet way of doing things is the One True Way that all should follow.

The above is *slightly* overstated... but many of us in the uucp world
have never been terribly happy about the Internet world's parochial and
patronizing "do it our way" approach to [dare I use the sacred word?]
internetworking.

Understand, I'm not saying that the Internet Way is necessarily bad.
On the whole, it's okay.  But when the answer to problems in internetworking
(*real* internetworking, not just two TCP/IP networks talking to each other)
is invariably "let them eat RFCs", one should expect a bit of resentment
from the heathens.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
