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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news.config
Subject: Re: name change -- now about site names in general
Message-ID: <883@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Feb-85 15:11:59 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.883
Posted: Mon Feb 18 15:11:59 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 20-Feb-85 03:27:43 EST
References: <484@digi-g.UUCP> <lsuc.405>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 57

In article <606@oddjob.UChicago.UUCP> matt@oddjob.UUCP (Matt Crawford) writes:
>That is my point exactly.  The UUCP project seems to be catering to
>AT&T's system V implementation of uucp.

If you have an alternative that will work, we'd love to hear about it.
After extensive discussions with a number of UUCP experts, we concluded
that we have no choice but to require all transport layer names to be
unique in the first 6 characters.  Among the reasons for this are that
all System V release 1 and 2 systems in the world have this 6 character
truncation, that System V Release 3 will not be released for some time,
and that even after all the major suppliers (e.g. Berkeley and AT&T, the
two roots from which the other vendors base their distribution) are
distributing a 14 character version, it will be years and years until
the rest of the world has converted.  There are still machines out
there running V7, and System III is still a major part of the market.
If one machine on the network only looks at the first 6 characters,
they can't talk to two machines that are not unique in the first 6,
which in turn means that these two machines can't safely choose to
use the same first 6 letters in case they might have to talk to a
machine that has this problem.  I don't think we can assume 14
characters until about 1990.

>In addition, the "UUCP Mail
>Transmission Format Standard" (hereafter "MTSF") by Mark Horton uses
>the phrase "6 letter UUCP [site] name", never saying that names might
>be longer if they are unique to 6 characters.

This is just naming.  We had to call these things something.  Perhaps
we should call them "transport addresses" or something.

Looking even further,
>The document "UUCP Subdomain Requirements" by Mark Horton and Karen
>Summers-Horton suggests, when choosing site names:
>
>	"Plan for the day you have lots of machines, for example,
>	``framus-a'' or ``a.framus'' if your company name is Framus
>	and your theme is letters of the alphabet, ..."
>
>Either the framus people have to break the rule or have to create a
>subdomain of one machine to allow for expansion later.

This is in reference to the domain names, not the transport names.
Domain names are not restricted to be unique in the first 6 chars.

>Why not send out a uucp that is more flexible as part of the package?

Mainly because UUCP is proprietary to AT&T and we'd get sued if we did.
We also have to deal with machines that have binary licenses and so we
can't send them modifications to existing code.  Finally, there are
restrictions in the System V license that say that even if the recipient
has a System V license, we have to pay AT&T some huge sum to become a
distributor and then pay AT&T a $750 royalty on every copy of our stuff
we send out, as though it were a full UNIX, if it contains any part of
System V.  Being a not-for-profit project with no working funds and a
volunteer structure, this is not possible.

	Mark Horton