Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!utstat!geoff From: geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) Subject: Re: C news compatibility (was Re: Patch dates or Patch Numbers) Message-ID: <1989Aug19.004434.29961@utstat.uucp> Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto References: <1989Aug9.164003.20669@utzoo.uucp> <6717@dayton.UUCP> <1989Aug18.102335.17269@utstat.uucp> <64125@uunet.UU.NET> Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 00:44:34 GMT Rick Adams: > (The rfc is 4 years old and out of date.) My copy of RFC 1036 is dated December 1987, so I make it 1.67 years old. > Where the RFC and Bnews differ the behavior of Bnews should generall be > considered correct. Henry and I do not buy this argument. The behaviour of B news does not make a de facto standard. > To me (and just about everyone else) backwards compatible means behaves > the same as Bnews. Perhaps we are not speaking the same language. My OED says ``compatible a. Consistent, able to coexist, (with); mutually tolerant; (of equipment etc.) able to be used in combination''. I don't see any meaning which implies cloning. C news is not a clone of B news. People who want a clone should get B news; it's a clone of B news. > your wrote something compatilble with the the RFC, so your have developed > a new transport. It is not backwards compatible with Bnews. And where is C news incompatible with the message format of B news? Our users seem to be exchanging news with B news sites just fine. > You are doing everyone a great disservice claiming that it is > backwards compatible. Anyone who has tried to use Cnews will tell > you that it is not. We have had letters from many satisfied users of C news; no one (other than you) who has actually used C news claims that it is incompatible with B news. > Cnews chose to have serveral incompatible (and wrong in my opinion) > differences with Bnews. Again, what are they? We haven't seen them. > If you were concerned about backwards compatibility, then you would have > paid attention to current behavior of the commonly used program > that defines the behavior that everyone expects. We have no interoperability problems. Fletcher Mattox: > If C news is backward compatible with B news, then why do I have to > have to modify NNTP to work with C news? In general, you don't have to; you can continue to suffer horrible performance. The two things you do need to compensate for are that B news changed its mind about case sensitivity of Message-IDs and C news uses the B 2.10.1 interpretation (case insensitive), and that NNTP relies on an implementation detail, the format of the second field of the history file (which B news changed its mind about; NNTP wants the B 2.11 format), so we provide a minor change to nntp/server/newnews.c to understand the C news format. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu