Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!rick From: rick@uunet.UU.NET (Rick Adams) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: C news compatibility (was Re: Patch dates or Patch Numbers) Summary: nonsense Message-ID: <64125@uunet.UU.NET> Date: 18 Aug 89 20:18:32 GMT References: <1989Aug9.164003.20669@utzoo.uucp> <6717@dayton.UUCP> <1989Aug18.102335.17269@utstat.uucp> Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA Lines: 21 nonsense. The RFC was an attempt to document the behavior of Bnews. (The rfc is 4 years old and out of date.) Where the RFC and Bnews differ the behavior of Bnews should generall be considered correct. To me (and just about everyone else) backwards compatible means behaves the same as Bnews. As I said before, your wrote something compatilble with the the RFC, so your have developed a new transport. It is not backwards compatible with Bnews. 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. Note the argument is not better or worse, but compatible vs. incompatible. Cnews chose to have serveral incompatible (and wrong in my opinion) differences with Bnews. Fine. Just dont claim to be backwards compatible. Dont rationalize your decisions by referring to the RFC. 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.