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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!columbia!topaz!hedrick
From: hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Name space explosion -- first tremors
Message-ID: <2968@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 28-Jul-85 00:02:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.2968
Posted: Sun Jul 28 00:02:04 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Jul-85 01:03:07 EDT
References: <568@decuac.UUCP> <531@down.FUN> <570@decuac.UUCP> <537@down.FUN> <9390@ucbvax.ARPA>
Reply-To: hedrick@topaz.UUCP (Chuck Hedrick)
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 23

You describe a problem with conventional UUCP addressing, namely that
down!honey is unique only until there is another down, at which point
you have to use princeton!down!honey, etc.  Unfortunately, domains
have an exactly similar problem.  As long as everyone uses the full
domain name, they are unique.  But I do not expect my users to use
red.rutgers.edu every time they want to send a message to red.  Indeed
the domain specs allow for abbreviations, e.g. red and red.rutgers.
It is likely that most domain implementations will allow such
abbreviations (in order to prevent lynching of the implementor by
irate users), and that most users will use them.  In that case, we
will address down!honey as honey@down, until there is another down, at
which point we will change to honey@down.princeton, etc.  

There are certainly advantages to down.princeton over princeton!down.
It does not specify a route.  So as we have to add more "." suffixes
to down, we do not end up constraining the route, as we do when we add
"!"  prefixes.  However in practice, this advantage is not likely to
be serious.  There is a de facto separation of machines into major and
minor network links.  Presumably no one is going to get away with
having a second UUCP machine called allegra.  I conjecture that almost
all machines are within one or two links of a machine so major that
duplication will not happen.  So in practice there is unlikely to be
any worse problem with ! syntax than domain syntax.