Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Who pays the bill? Message-ID: Date: 13 Aug 90 09:29:17 GMT References: <26A738A8.725B@tct.uucp> <1990Aug8.214750.1614@wolves.uucp> <66582@sgi.sgi.com> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 78 In-reply-to: bob@MorningStar.Com's message of 10 Aug 90 16:59:19 GMT On 10 Aug 90 16:59:19 GMT, bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) said: bob> In article <66582@sgi.sgi.com> vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon bob> Schryver) writes: vjs> Finally take "...!trash!foo.bar.bozo!user" and vjs> "...!trash!foo.uunet.net!user" Are either "foo.bar.bozo" or vjs> "foo.uunet.net" FQDNs in that context? It is sadly likely that vjs> many people will presume to answer for the owners of trash. What vjs> if trash is a novel Bitnet/CSNET/JANET/EBCDIC device that considers vjs> "." an ordinary character? bob> If traffic moves between addressing schemes, it's the responsibility bob> of the gateway to ensure that the traffic conformant with each set of bob> standards - whichever side the traffic happens to be on at the moment. Not, it is not. It may be *impossible* to translate between the two schemes; for example between UUCP and Internet schemes. UUCP uses non centrally registered relative addresses, and Internet centrally registered absolute ones, and they cannot in general be translated one to another. The drive to get UUCP names sanitized is really a drive to change the nature of the UUCP addressing scheme so that it becomes semantically equivalent to the Internet one. Whether this is desirable or not is irrelevant when confronted with the idea that it cannot be done for all UUCP sites, not to mention for all the non UUCP addressing schemes. Even the argument "tough, we'll ignore anything tht does not adapt to the rules of the Internet because we are bigger" fails, as there are more "important" networks than the Internet already. vjs> UUCP (tm) is UUCP, different from the Internet (tm). Then there vjs> are Bitnet, Fido, X.400, and other things not dreamed of in our vjs> philosophies. bob> And when the twain meet, they must learn to speak each others' bob> languages. Again, this is an *impossible* requirement. It assumes that all naming schemes are equivalent bar the syntax, and that gateways know *everything* about the addressing schemes they interface. I am a bit sickened by the tunnel vision of Internet centered people. Many do not know that name resolution is not the same as routing; naming schemes are not equivalent; when two gateways interface, neither should know about how the other does its business, beyond using an agreed interchange format. Given that our problem is how to live with multiple naming schemes, It would be helpful if there were *in each scheme* some way to escape from it. This is the solution to the apple.com vs. sgi.apple.com problems. Currently we have the unsatisfactory use of the local part of an RFC822 address for this use, and the resulting % hack to quote @ in it. There are other possible solutions, something like encapsulation, e.g. either in the header or in the body of the message. I'd prefer it in the envelope part of the header, incidentally, for the RFC side mailers. I mean, something like 'To:' addressing the gateway, and 'Then-To:' the address beyond that gateway. Now, a (disingenuous) question for all the smart Internet people out there: which RFC defines a way to pass mail thru a foreign address gateway and express addresses beyond that gateway? Which is the RFC sanctioned way to qualify an address with the gateway that can understand it? Note: in the UUCP world, ! serves three purposes: for routing (a!b!c says "forward to a, then b, then c"), for name definition (x!y!z says "host z is a neighbour of y, a neighbour of x"), and as a naming resolution operator (g!h!i says "g knows how to interpret the meaning of 'h!i'"). It is so bad that most people ignore this, and the obvious advantages (except that it is maybe a bit too much overloaded, even if unambiguosly). -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk