Hector Santos <hsantos(_at_)santronics(_dot_)com> writes:
Russ Allbery wrote:
Huh. I suppose I should thank someone that I've never had to deal with
commercial applications living that many decades in the past.
Well, IMO, things don't have to always change just for the sake of
"change."
Getting rid of uuencode for MIME is not change for the sake of change.
uuencode was a badly broken way of handling attachments in multiple ways.
I say this as someone who has written his own uuencode and uudecode
processors and used the protocol for various applications, mail and
non-mail, over the years. I'd be happy to never see it again.
It's like many pre-MIME ways of doing things that MIME now has better ways
of doing, such as some of the Usenet article signature algorithms. The
old ways mostly work until you look at them funny or hit some corner case,
and then they turn into a mess. It's that lack of attention to detail and
edge cases that I mean when I say poor engineering. Most of those systems
were designed in a much simpler time and were, at the time, following the
"simplest thing that could possibly work" approach. MIME is a refactoring
to deal with all of the interoperability problems that came up in practice
after using them for many years.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>