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From: jas@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Jim Shankland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: UUPC on Macintosh anyone?
Keywords: UUPC Mac MPW
Message-ID: <27642@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 20 Jan 89 17:57:40 GMT
References: <4856@ll1a.att.com> <2054@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <6342@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jas@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Jim Shankland)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 42

In article <6342@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>That's UUCP, guys, which stands for "Unix to UNIX Copy".  ("cp" is the
>copy command on UNIX.)  A few points on the porting idea.

I've been assuming that UUPC is a non-ATT implementation of UUCP for
PC's -- not a typo.  Am I right?

>One, a port as such is probably illegal without the express permission
>of AT&T, unless there's a public domain version I don't know about ....

See above comment.

>Second, UUCP is very ugly....  The protocol
>is undocumented outside the source code; the protocol itself is awful
>even once you figure it out ....

I have (somewhere ...) a document written by Greg Chesson (I think),
describing the protocol.  It was posted to the net, with a preface
stating that the document could be freely distributed.

>Third, a lot of UUCP applications assume that you have a UNIX command
>interpreter running on your computer.

It shouldn't be that hard, once the protocols are done, to throw something
together that will at least allow sending and receiving of mail and
news, without actually implementing a UNIX shell.  Personally, I
don't see a need for uuxqt in its full, general ... uh ... glory.

>Finally, I recommend you look into the idea of using a better quality
>protocol like Kermit to accomplish whatever it is you're hoping to do.

A fine solution for some problems.  But -- like Mt. Everest -- uucp
is there.  It would be useful to be able to get a mail and/or news
feed from an arbitrary UNIX machine without having to make changes
on the feeding machine.  For similar reasons, some people end up
running uucp on top of TCP/IP, which in one way is an extremely stupid
thing to do, but in another way makes all the sense in the world.

Jim Shankland
jas@ernie.berkeley.edu

"I've been walking in a river all my life, and now my feet are wet"