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 (The rfc is 4 years old and out of date.)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