From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 02 2002 - 11:36:15 CDT
Clive D W Feather <clive@demon.net> writes:
> Someone was saying, in this discussion, that "email is essential to
> news" or something like that. The only way in which email is even
> slightly essential to news is in getting messages to moderators. So it's
> worth asking if there is another distribution mechanism, because if
> there is one, and one that is 8-bit clean, it greatly weakens the
> arguments for hacking around UTF-8 names just to keep the mail people
> happy.
If we could change all of the moderation software to accept articles a
different way, we could change all of the moderation software to support
encapsulation. Probably more easily.
Furthermore, while you're correct that mail certainly isn't essential to
running a news server, mail gatewaying, whether unidirectionally or
bidirectionally, is one of the most common applications of news software,
and therefore is important to consider. Not worrying about compatibility
with mail is, to me, a bit like not worrying about posting of binaries.
Many of us may not like that this constitutes the percentage of news
volume that it does, but like it or not, it's one of the major things that
people use news technology for.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>