From: Bernie Cosell (bernie@fantasyfarm.com)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 07:43:30 CDT
On 4 Aug 2002, at 21:19, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Bernie Cosell said:
> > But the thing that continues to strike me in this discussion is that email
> > *SURELY* needs to embrace better-than-7-bit headers,
> [...]
>
> Yes, but they're scared of sendmail and its legacy position of mangling the
> top bit. That biases *everything*. News has been 8-bit-clean since the year
> dot.
>
> > *GIVEN* that there is some email-rule for putting better
> > than 8-bit stuff into email headers, why do we [as usenet folk] *CARE* what
> > that mechanism is?
>
> Basically, the problem is that it's not trivial to encode or decode, and
> the same string has multiple encoded forms. For email, which is mostly
> one-to-one, this isn't that bad a problem. For news, where fast comparison
> of strings (particularly newsgroup names) is important (because of the
> sheer bulk that *each * major server needs to handle), this is serious.
> Furthermore, you need something compatible with the present news
> infrastructure, which restricts things as well.
AAHHHH... I do apologize for my density, but the light (at last) dawns.
Of course. A modest news server (much less one of the mega-servers)
handles more articles per day than an email admin could imagine in their
worst nightmare [the hotmail and aol admins excepted... I don't know how
those folks stay sane and I can't *imagine* how a mail system that is
going to accept 500 million messages a day for delivery to 26 million
emailboxes could work...:o)].
It isn't that the news servers would have to *change* [they'll all have
to change *anyway* if/when you change the format for news articles], but
whatever change happens *MUST* be one that allows news servers to
dispatch incoming articles *really*quickly*.
*THAT'S* what this is all about, and doing the email-style decoding is
just too much of PITA on the critical-path for article handling. That
also accounts for the disconnect between the design groups --- it is a
'ho hum' matter for email, but a critical one for news.
Duh.. you'd have thought I could have figured that out without belaboring
the issue with y'all so much.. THANKS!
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--