[9fans] allowing space (ASCII 0x20) in file names

[G. David Butler gdb@dbSystems.com]

From: geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com

>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

I also listed the "applications"

>>the application to live with the OS.  Remember INN, CYRUS and SAMBA
>>are applications that already exist...

>NNTP may not be little but it's certainly weird or at least
>irrelevant.

Not to the internet.  Not yet.

>             I normally prefer not to talk about my shadey past, but
>as senior author of C News and inventor of nov, the common

Thanks for C News.  I was an early adopter and helped to create dbz.

>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

The volume is there because it is *used*.  News is different now,
things change.

>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 never seen it.  Is it available somewhere?

>I've always felt that NNTP is poorly suited to news transport and news
>reading.

humm...

>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

Ok, why didn't you and the other news movers and shakers do something
about it?  Could it be that not everybody likes NFS?  Sure, you could
implement a NFS server to optimize news type accesses, but it dictates
certain underlying OS support (e.g. file links, 255 character file
names, etc.)

Don't you find 9P (or Styx) a little restrictive regarding the length
of file names (ignore the OS for now, just look at the protocol.)  Since
the protocol allows 8k blocks, why not add a length indicator (like
count[2] in Twrite) that allows ~8k for long descriptive file names.
There is precedence, Twrite and Tread have offset[8] (64bits) even
though the OS only uses 32 bits of it.

>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

[snip explanation of the current crazy world of RFCs]

Commercial interests now drive the RFC process.  For example, INN is
free but to participate you are "supposed" to pgp verify newgroup and
rmgroup messages.  How many news servers on the internet do you think
have RSA and PGP licenses?

[end of rant]

I spent $350 on two books and a CD that introduce some interesting
concepts in computing.  The authors published the information in
hopes that the ideas would catch on and grow.  From the Plan9 FAQ
(http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/faq.html)  "... to succeed it
must be used ...".  I'm trying to demonstrate that it can be used
for applications that are considered "hard" at scale.  At first
I'm going to provide a free NNTP server with a few hundred gigabytes
of storage at the end of a DS3 connected to the internet, for research.
If I can keep it together and it functions well, I will try (yet again)
to get a reasonable license from Lucent that allows me to charge
customers to connect to the server.  If all that happens I will then
add SMTP, POP, IMAP (including IMAP access to NEWS) and HTTP servers.
This is an attempt to start a business of providing robust and cost
effective server platforms to the internet.

You may not like me mucking with the core of the system, but if
that is what it takes...

David Butler
gdb@dbSystems.com