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

[geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com]

David, you're welcome to the last word; I don't want to drag this out.

Friends who read netnews and maintain it tell me that things have indeed
changed, for the worse: not only is volume ever-increasing, but the vast
preponderance of netnews these days is porno and spam.  Ignoring all that,
you've still got to find the signal in what's left (as always).  I think
the design criteria of A News were about right: 1 to 2 useful articles per
day, it's just much harder to find them now.  The bandwidth is being used,
all right, but to what end?  I'm told that a `full feed' runs to 1 - 2
gigabytes per day, depending on who you ask for numbers, and that
information is undoubtedly out of date; it's surely much more now.

I would have thought my record of activism against NNTP, especially for
news reading, spoke for itself.  To hit some highlights: the C News crew
ignored NNTP for years; publicly encouraged use of NFS or other, better
remote file systems instead of NNTP for news reading, despite aversion to
NFS as an inferior network file system; denounced the (buggy) `relaynews
daemon' hackery done elsewhere to inject (pointlessly) redundant incoming
NNTP connections directly into the guts of C News; and when uucp began to
fade (never to be fully replaced) and our netnews neighbours insisted that
we exchange news via NNTP, we wrote and shipped a pair of simple,
non-munging, exchange-only NNTP programs.  When I invented nov and did the
first proof-of-concept implementations, I deliberately made it easy to get
the nov files by merely importing /usr/spool/news but deliberately ignored
access to nov data via NNTP.  Some people can't take a hint (nor a strong
suggestion).

Indeed, despite common sense and all our efforts, some people professed to
prefer NNTP to file systems.  In hindsight, we may have incorrectly
expected that people would figure out for themselves that NNTP is
defective; that given the Internet, you normally only need one news feed
and thus can use remote file access or even uucp or FTP or rsh or a bare
TCP connection to exchange news; and that it's simpler and better for news
readers to just read from files instead of having to contain code to read
from files and completely different code to request and read articles via
NNTP sockets.  Perhaps we should have declared a jihad on NNTP, but life
is short and the Internet is full of defective protocols (take a look at
FTP, never mind the obnoxious interactive Unix client), with more popping
up every day.  What can you do?  You can lead a hacker to wisdom, but you
can't make him think.

Now that 9P and Styx specifications and implementations are available
outside Lucent, we're all in an even better position to push for use of
good remote file systems instead of Yet Another Dopey Internet Protocol.
Any protocol that ends in TP for `Transfer Protocol' is an obvious
candidate for being eliminated by using remote file access instead.  In
the short run, there may still be some utility in replacing some of the
existing clunkers (e.g. SMTP, LDAP, TELNET, DNS) with improved protocols,
but surely the long-term goal should be Fewer But Better Protocols, and
the Better Protocols should certainly include (at least) one file system
protocol.

Geoff Collyer
NNTP Non-Proliferation Task Force