From: petrilli@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Chris Petrilli)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.bbs.misc
Subject: Re: DTS-0001 proposed standard
Date: 27 Jan 93 16:43:24 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Department of Redundency Department
NNTP-Posting-Host: hal.ai.mit.edu

"Peter" = peter@globv1.hacktic.nl (Peter Busser) 
"Me" = petrilli@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Chris Petrilli)

Me> The problem I have is that it creates yet another set of "islands" in
Me> the network that have to be interfaced.  Given, those islands are
Me> larger, but they are still islands.

Peter> That is the difference between the bottom up and top down
Peter> approach. You propose a top down approach. The proposed bottom
Peter> up approach (i.e. the TDS-0001 document) will solve the short
Peter> term problems of a small group of people. And a top down
Peter> approach would solve long term problems. So I don't think that
Peter> either way is "better" than the other as they have different
Peter> goals. In short, it is good to have a short term solution, but
Peter> it would be even better to have a long term solution, a real
Peter> generic standard, as well.

The problems I see stem from the incompatibilities between the long
term and short term goals.  It seems to me that FidoNet (and the other
networks) long for connectivity to the Internet, but right now, the
only way to do so is thorugh all kinds of gateways that are flakey at
best.  If they really want to work with the Internet, then they should
be moving toward the Internet standards, otherwise, it'll never be
anything more than a kludge.  The introduction of a new small set of
standards is fine, but it should be a transisition point to the final
stage, and the standards offered are nothing like what would be
required, and would present the need for yet another revision of the
software, rather than just a small modification.

Me> It would be better to ignore the "operating system specific"
Me> concepts and go for REAL standards that are usable by everyone
Me> rather than a subset.  There's so much that is left out of this
Me> document that it's difficult to use.

Peter> Well, then you're going to talk about functionality and not
Peter> about implementation. That would still allow for different
Peter> implementations of the same standard to be incompatible. Have a
Peter> peek in comp.mail.misc, there is a discussion about "the UNIX
Peter> mailbox format". All mailboxes use a RFC-822 type message
Peter> layout, but there are nevertheless many incompatibilities.

If the standard is complete they will interoperate.  The RFC822
standard does not specific mailbox format, it simply specifies mail
header and body formats and needs.  The reason there are
incompatibilities (and there are not many) is that there are two or
three different mods to the standard "Unix mailbox," such as the RAND
MH pack format and the Bablyl format.  If you offer a standard to this
then you fix the problem if people comply with it.  I though the goal
was to make them interoperate rahter than making them all look alike?  

Me> The best thing to do is just simply adopt the Internet standard
Me> which will allow for almost anything on the face of the planet.
Me> The date standard I mentioned is the european one, not the
Me> american one.

Peter> That won't help the people that are stuck with FidoNet stuff at
Peter> all. The only thing for MS-DOS that looks like a BBS (flames
Peter> >/dev/null please) and does USENET and e-mail is Waffle.

It has always been my opinion that FidoNet is broken since it is
incompatible with all the standards that are dominant in other
computer communities, and it was short sighted not to adopt the
Internet standards.  You're gonna have to change some day, might as
well change now.

Chris
-- 
| Chris Petrilli                                             ____
| petrilli@gnu.ai.mit.edu             ``Quayle is a bozoe.'' \  /
| I don't even speak for myself.                              \/