🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1631@umix.cc.umich.edu> honey@citi.umich.edu (Peter Honeyman) writes:
>In article <7333@e.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) writes:
>>At the moment our problem with it [mush] is that
>>
>>	1. It wants to do routing ... That feature can be turned
>>	   off, but still it doesn't belong in a User Agent.

First, I think I said that about ELM, not MUSH.  I personally haven't
looked at MUSH enough to say that about it.  But no matter, the
objection is still correct.

>it follows from bitter experience that routing in the DA should be of
>the most casual style ("dumb" or "first host" routing).
>
>the UA is precisely where routing belongs, where it can be as smart as
>you like since the user can inspect and modify the result.
>
>	peter

Putting the routing into the UA would require my users to know all
sorts of grungy details about networks.  Things which they don't want
to know!  Things which change from time to time.  seismo is no longer
the forwarder for the Known World.  ihnp4 is no longer the center of
the universe.  akgua no longer is the center of the southeast, and
cbosgd will probably no longer be the center of the eastern-mid-west.
And so on.  Two of the networks we're on want us to believe there is no
such things as routes, and for the most part there isn't.  (BITNET and
the Internet).

Not even I (the E-mail hack for the U of KY) want to deal with that
routing baggage in the User Agent.

Also, I don't think I could possibly generate the appropriate information
with the configuration of the local systems.  Locally we have an 11/750
and some uVaxIIen and some Sunen and a Sequent.  For historical reasons,
the Vaxen are the main machines ... especially for mail purposes.  The
interface into bitnet is at the 750.  The interface into uucp is on
one of the uVaxIIen.  The "controlling system" from which all the connection
information is emanated is yet another uVaxIIen.  That's 3 machines which
have a good idea of the shape of the world.  ALL of the other machines
only know about the local machines, and to forward anything they don't
know about over to the "controlling system".

Suppose we've got this fancy-dancy user-agent you've described before,
where you give it an address and it tells you the way it's going to
route it, allowing the details to be changed as desired.  (I'll pretend
for the moment that this is do-able under MMDF, which I'm not sure
if it is or isn't ...).  I'm sending mail from a uVaxII workstation
which doesn't have the disk-space to store the whole routing database.
Where do I get the information from?  Yah, I could have some sort
of protocol the UA talks to a server on a central machine ... 

This fancy database/server combination doesn't help anyway.  The maps
are always a couple of months out of date, a fact which will probably
never change.  Given that it's always out of date, how is every last
one of my users going to be able to keep up with the connection
information.  They generally have a very vague idea how all this stuff
works to begin with?  But all this stuff we're talking about here is
stuff-to-be-implemented.  And also of questionable value (i.e. it's
questionable if many people want it).
-- 
<---- David Herron,  Local E-Mail Hack,  david@ms.uky.edu, david@ms.uky.csnet
<----                    {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- 
<---- E-Mail hacks get to talk about Spanish Cows whenever they want.