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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!decvax!harpo!seismo!ut-sally!jsq
From: jsq@ut-sally.UUCP (John Quarterman)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: "blaming Unix SendMail"
Message-ID: <2048@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 21-Apr-84 23:55:26 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2048
Posted: Sat Apr 21 23:55:26 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Apr-84 01:24:15 EST
References: <491@hou3c.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 34

There is no advantage in UUCP style a!b!c relative addressing:  it
exists for historical reasons and those of us who deal with the UUCP
network as it stands are forced to deal with it because many (most?)
UUCP sites do not have any way of dealing with Internet-style
addresses.  One hopes the UUCP domain project will allow the phasing
out of the old-style relative addressing, but until then hosts that
deal with both UUCP and the Internet (and CSNET and several local
networks in ut-sally's case) must be able to map between addressing
syntaxes.  We at ut-sally encourage users to enter addresses in
Internet domain syntax and let sendmail call a program to look up a
UUCP route and convert to relative form.  We do not encourage the use
of the relative form; we tolerate it because we still have to.

The problem of bang!decwrl!rhea!bang!user having bang in there
twice was quite common for a while.  DEC's ENET was hooked up to
UUCP in a fashion that pretended all DEC's machines were actually
UUCP sites.  Yet there were at least 20 name duplications:  vortex,
for instance, existed on both sides of the gateway.  The DEC domain
has lately taken on some solidity and addresses now tend to appear
more like bang!decwrl!user%bang.DEC, which removes the problem.
Until the UUCP domain exists, there will always be the possibility
of duplicate sites within the UUCP network proper (seems like there
used to be two machines named "turtlevax").

Religious arguments about "TOPS-20 does it better" are beside the
point:  I've never run across anybody who likes sendmail's configuration
syntax, and I wish somebody *would* write a compiler to convert from
some more reasonable language, but sendmail does get the job done.
(At least when there's somebody as patient as Smoot to make it do it.)
Part of the job *is* converting among diverse addressing syntaxes.
-- 
John Quarterman, CS Dept., University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712 USA
jsq@ut-sally.ARPA, jsq@ut-sally.UUCP, {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!jsq
					moskvax!kgbvax!mcc!ut-sally!jsq