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From: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: uucp and domains considered immiscible
Message-ID: <1540@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 2-Aug-85 13:40:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1540
Posted: Fri Aug  2 13:40:39 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Aug-85 21:29:32 EDT
References: <552@down.FUN>
Reply-To: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 38

Thank you Peter, for a well reasoned article.  I'm not sure I agree with
your final conclusion (although it does follow from your premises, to
some extent), but then, I'm not sure I know what I think the "best"
solution is, anyway.  However, I must disagree with one of your points.
I present here a concatenation of statements from your message.

In article <552@down.FUN> honey@down.FUN (Peter Honeyman) writes:

>in the abstract, this graph need not have any special properties: it
>can be cyclic, unconnected, have sinks, etc.  in practice, about all
>you can say is that it's sparse yet "clumpy" and that no host can have
>out-edges to multiple identically named hosts.
Sounds good, so far.

>o       it's inevitable.  my uucp dialing/login info is public, so my
>	host has hundreds, perhaps thousands more "in-edges" than
>	"out-edges."  
We begin to see here the glimmerings of a problem.  In particular, you
can control your out edges, but not your in edges.  Suppose one of the
three "bilbo" sites decides to call you.  You have NO WAY of knowing
from which of the three the call came.  You may have only one "bilbo"
out edge, but this does NOT protect you from getting a message from one
of the other "bilbo" sites in such a way that it LOOKS like a local
message.  If, on the other hand, their names were specified absolutely
via a domain-type scheme, you would always know which one was addressing
you.

>
>where the uucp graph can have no host name conflicts, the name space
>induced by pathalias has many.  so pathalias, in attempting to solve
>one problem, introduces another.
As we can see above, the uucp graph CAN have host name conflicts, in
trying to determine the SOURCE (not destination) of a message.

-- 
=Spencer   ({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas@utah-cs.ARPA)
	"You don't get to choose how you're going to die.  Or when.
	 You can only decide how you're going to live." Joan Baez