Paul,
_New_ services get created in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reason.
PV> if you believe that ssh was a new service (compared to telnet) then i agree
PV> with this perspective. i think that you won't, though. new ways of doing
PV> old things can appear, and old ways of doing those same things can
disappear,
PV> and this is good and right and healthy.
Interesting example. It would help if ssh had achieved Internet-scale
use and had displaced telnet. On the other hand, terminal-oriented
traffic used to dominate net statistics and now probably does not show
up in the top 5.
So it would help to see an example that showed massive displacement of
a very large, installed base, before we assume that switching email
protocols is that straightforward.
PV> smtp won't have to be declared dead
PV> in order for me to stop using it when something better comes into existence.
of course. the is not about declarations. it is about the challenge
of convincing 500 million people and perhaps 200,000 organizations, to
switch.
PV> it's worth remembering that mail was once transferred using the ftp
protocol.
Indeed it was. And it is worth noting that the protocol that replaced
it provided nearly the same service, other than the efficiency
enhancement of multiple addressees during a single transfer. Users
saw no change to email semantics, only better performance for when
there were long address list.
However, I suspect you have in mind a change that is a tad more
disruptive to the end user service model than that.
But that is only a guess since there is no detailed proposal to
comment on.
(I also should not avoid the chance to make the trivial observation
that the scale of Internet operations was a tad smaller then.)
At a minimum, claims that we need to replace smtp need to include a
specific proposal that offers specific features absent from smtp. And
it needs to include a transition plan for those hundreds of thousands
of operators and 1/2 billion users.
PV> actually, they don't. and, if you stack the problem grain to grain like
PV> that, you'll never cut through.
It's difficult to see the superior basis for making wholesale changes
to a very large installed base. The current style people have, for
discussing any of this topic in public fora looks pretty much
identical to clinical hysteria.
ready, fire, aim.
d/
--
Dave Crocker <dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <www.brandenburg.com>
Sunnyvale, CA USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>