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From: kre@munnari.oz (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: what do _YOU_ mean by "all routing"??
Summary: Parentheses are no solution
Message-ID: <2294@munnari.oz>
Date: 12 Aug 88 11:15:16 GMT
References: <676@bacchus.DEC.COM> <881@vsi1.UUCP> <3732@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <866@l.cc.purdue.edu>
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In article <866@l.cc.purdue.edu>, cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> So what is the answer?  An answer which has been proposed before is the use
> of parentheses, or some such equivalent.

That will never work .. all it could ever do is create more incompatabilities,
which is what it would be nice to do away with.

In any case, for the current problem it wouldn't help at all.  There would
be a set of sites that obey the restrictions you want the parentheses to
imply (which would be much the same as the set of sites that look only at
the first host in a bang path, and route to that one), and a set of sites
that ignore your parentheses, look at what's inside, and "know" that they
can find a better route than the one you gave.

The problem that parentheses might fix (if it was rationally possible to
change anything this darmatically) is the ! @ incompatability (which should
be used).  That's not at all relevant to the current discussion.

kre