From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 00:04:21 -0400
From: geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com
Subject: [9fans] allowing space (ASCII 0x20) in file names
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 74a4a3a4-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19980410040421.zmutMUx7wyreLl1jwWZeZcPf_RzWuOQWbDlRiTAgPRE@z>

I'll second td's comments and note that he described your application
as `one weird little application'; NNTP, IMAP and CIFS are network
protocols, not applications, and their implementations may or may not
be related to the size of their specifications (one would hope not,
given the size of many protocol specifications).

NNTP may not be little but it's certainly weird or at least
irrelevant.  I normally prefer not to talk about my shadey past, but
as senior author of C News and inventor of nov, the common
news-overview database used by the reader software, I've seen a lot of
netnews and its growth over time, and it's hard to see why anyone
would want to read netnews any more (I quit years ago).  The signal in
the noise is so faint it's almost undetectable and the volume is
ludicrously high.  If you did want to receive a very small subset of
netnews, you'd surely be better off with forsyth's plan 9 netnews
implementation than with INN and its CERT alert.  As may be obvious,
I've always felt that NNTP is poorly suited to news transport and news
reading.

The Internet needs fewer but better protocols.  One that it doesn't
need is NNTP.  (SMTP is another, and I'm tackling it first.)  For a
lot of things, my preference is to use filesystem protocols like 9P or
Styx.  Even NFS is a better protocol than NNTP for reading news.  For
example, it wasn't necessary to change NFS nor issue a revision of the
NFS RFC(s) when nov was invented; both were necessary for NNTP (the
news readers had to change either way to exploit nov).  This business
of inventing a new protocol (and RFC or six) every time someone has an
idea is looney and contributes to the ever-increasing proliferation of
RFCs (not to mention the difficulty of speaking with authority; a new
RFC obsoleting the ones you've read may have been issued since you
checked last month or week or hour).  To see what I mean about RFCs,
try to find the complete set of current (not yet obsoleted) RFCs
pertaining to mail, including the dozens of SMTP extensions and the
dozens of MIME RFCs.  Now find all the current draft RFCs pertaining
to mail.  Do it again a month later to make sure more RFCs (and
drafts) haven't been bred in the sewers while you were doing real
work.  Read all the RFCs you found, rinse and repeat until dizzy or
you need to get back to work.

Geoff Collyer
RFC Non-Proliferation League