Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!gatech!ncar!ames!zodiac!zooks!jordan
From: jordan@zooks.ads.com (Jordan Hayes)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: this might be getting out of hand...
Message-ID: <5196@zodiac.UUCP>
Date: 17 Aug 88 18:37:16 GMT
References: <3670@bsu-cs.UUCP> <4381@umix.cc.umich.edu> <3678@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Sender: news@zodiac.UUCP
Reply-To: jordan@ads.com (Jordan Hayes)
Organization: Advanced Decision Systems, Mt. View, CA (415) 960-7300
Lines: 32

Rahul Dhesi  writes:

	Actually, the domain system is really just an addressing scheme
	and not a name service.

If you wanna be picky about it, it's not an addressing scheme, but
rather (as the name would imply -- "The Domain Naming System"), a
hierarchical *naming* system.  It only specifies how to name things,
and an *example implementation* of how one might provide *name service*
using this naming scheme is outlined (with some random examples of
classes of "labels" that might be used, like hostnames, IP addresses,
etc. -- Hesiod uses the same naming system, but uses a superset of
these classes of labels)

	The name service that the Internet provides is a part of the
	delivery mechanism.

Not true.  It is in fact very separate, since it's not just used for
mail, but general key -> value{,s} lookup ... the fact that SMTP as a
transport agent makes use of one lookup service over another is not
specified.  Current *convention* is that SMTP mailers on the Internet
use DNS lookups, but there's no reason that they couldn't use something
else (since they had for some time used static host tables in whatever
OS-specific format they came in).

	A UUCP link can also be part of the delivery mechanism if the
	destination site is a UUCP site.

Hmmm.  Now that you've begun to argue semantics, you've completely lost
me on your use of "UUCP link" and "delivery mechanism" ...

/jordan