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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!ut-sally!im4u!jsq
From: jsq@im4u.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Mail routing -- problems showing up
Message-ID: <360@im4u.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 30-Jul-85 10:56:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: im4u.360
Posted: Tue Jul 30 10:56:32 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Aug-85 00:23:44 EDT
References: <3018@nsc.UUCP> <2875@topaz.ARPA> <536@down.FUN> <686@umd5.UUCP>
Reply-To: jsq@im4u.UUCP (John Quarterman)
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 61

UUCP requires the user to supply source routing.  Practically no other
widely-spread network does.  Not the ARPA Internet, not BITNET, not the
XEROX Internet, not PUP nets, not the Australian ACSNET, etc.  You can
*do* source routing in the ARPA Internet, but hardly anybody ever
does:  not because the syntax to do it is arcane (which it is), but
because there's no need.

In the current state of the world, you need source routing to get
*between* networks, e.g., user%host.CSNET@csnet-relay.ARPA.  Given
domains and domain name service, which are gradually actually coming
into use, the source routing (and the %) disappears, and there is only
user@host.SUBDOMAIN.DOMAIN, e.g., jsq@sally.UTEXAS.EDU.  A person
can then have one network address in domain style instead of two
or three in various different syntaxes.  An absolute address which
does not vary depending on what host or network it is being used from.

Restrained flame:

Except possibly for UUCP, where some people are for some reason
enamored of personally controlling the paths their mail takes (system
administrators have to control what goes in and out of their machines,
to some extent, to control their phone bills, but why should ordinary
users care, and why should it be done at the application level?).  And
where people complain bitterly that domains are being forced down their
throats.  Well, that's not what it looks like to me.  It looks to me
like some UUCP advocates are trying to force explicit source routing on
networks which don't need it.  Why is this?  Practically every other
network has gotten along without users having to do explicit source
routing for many years.

Peter Honeyman brags that he has written the best version of UUCP and
the best UUCP path finder.  Well, that's admirable.  But even the best
version of UUCP is still a kludge, because it does not support implicit
routing, and even the best version of pathalias is still a patch to fix
the problem of UUCP not having implicit routing.  ACSNET has shown that
implicit routing is possible in a network supported by the same sorts
of underlying network connections as UUCP (maybe it won't scale up, but
then, maybe it will, too:  maybe we should try it and see).  Even given
UUCP as is, pathalias used to provide routing underneath a domain
naming scheme can make UUCP fit in with the rest of the world, where
UUCP and pathalias used to try to make the rest of the world look like
UUCP cannot.  I agreed with the idea of smart gateways translating
syntaxes between networks, for a while, but there are just too many
problems with that idea (basically, no absolute naming, and differing
host name syntaxes), which have recently been described by others in
this newsgroup.

Rob Pike complained (at the Portland USENIX) that domain naming uses
too many special syntactic characters and is thus ugly, and furthermore
that it doesn't allow relative addresses.  Well, this is ugly:
user%host.DOMAIN@host.DOMAIN, and even uglier if you mix in some !s.
But the % is a temporary kludge, one hopes, and the !s could go away,
leaving user@DOM1.DOM2.DOM.  That still includes two separators, it's
true, and user.DOM1.DOM2.DOM might have been better.  However,
it supplies absolute addressing, which UUCP syntax cannot.

Why should the defects of UUCP be foisted on the rest of the world,
which has gotten along quite well without them for many years?
-- 
John Quarterman,   UUCP:  {ihnp4,seismo,harvard,gatech}!ut-sally!jsq
ARPA Internet and CSNET:  jsq@ut-sally.ARPA, soon to be jsq@sally.UTEXAS.EDU