Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: C news compatibility (was Re: Patch dates or Patch Numbers) Message-ID: <1989Aug19.225027.24194@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1989Aug9.164003.20669@utzoo.uucp> <6717@dayton.UUCP> <1989Aug19.004434.29961@utstat.uucp> <64167@uunet.UU.NET> Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 22:50:27 GMT In article <64167@uunet.UU.NET> rick@uunet.UU.NET (Rick Adams) writes: >Something is backwards compatible when you can replace an older system >with it and things keep running. Quite a few older systems have been replaced by C News, and Usenet is still running fine. When people replace B2.nn with C News, their news readers keep running. (In fact, utzoo ran B New's readnews until about a year ago.) Sounds backwards compatible to me. >If you could remove all of the Bnews executables and replace them >with Cnews and the system kept running, then it would be backwards >compatible. Clearly you can not do that. Therefore, clearly it is not backwards >compatible. Of course, when one replaced the B2.10.1 executables with B2.11 ones, duplicate-article rejection broke until all the old entries got expired out of the history file, because of the change to message-id case policy. That being a rather serious matter for many sites, clearly B2.11 was not backwards compatible with B2.10.1, by your reasoning. (*Why* it was done is irrelevant, by your own definition.) >Messageids are case independant. Period. You intentionally ignore it >with some sleazy rationalization about its not being in the RFC. We ignore it because the specifications say it's not true. The matter very definitely is in RFC822. RFC1036 says 822 dominates in the event of dispute, and on this issue there isn't even a dispute, since 1036 is silent on the matter. (Actually, we agree that the wording about 822 dominating needs to be revised, since taken literally it invalidates most of 1036, but here there can be little doubt about what the current specs say.) >The RFC is wrong. My name is on the RFC. I think that lets me >say with some authority whether the RFC is wrong or not. No argument. However, it begs the question: what's right? Dennis Ritchie considers C bitfields "a botch and a blemish" (his exact words), but I trust you would not buy a C compiler that therefore left them out. Dennis no longer sets the standard for C; B2.11 and its maintainer no longer set the standard for news. In both cases, the standard is set by a consensus document, not by a man ("government of laws, not men"). When the documents are wrong, eventually they get revised, but until then, they are the best standard we've got and the proper basis for a new implementation. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu