Re: NOS is evil

[jmorriso@bogomips.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison)]

> 
> >The XLZW extension isn't very useful: noone on the real internet uses
> >it; it's completely non-standard. I can turn the tables around, and
> >ask whether JNOS smtp supports MIME and ESMTP; I don't think it does.
> >(more people use ESMTP than will ever use XLZW)
> 
> This can change. All somebody has to do is write an Internet Draft
> that sets out the details and send it out for comment. I think a
> stream compression option for TCP would be generally useful and would
> pick up a fair amount of interest.

What's the history of the XLZW extension? Anyone want to speculate on
why an RFC was never put out on it? Without one it doesn't have a
chance outside of the ham community. The real people to convince would
be the Berkeley Sendmail guys, without their backing, it would become
just another obsolete RFC.

As Alan said, gzip would be more appropriate these days. 

A stream compression option for TCP would indeed be a cool thing; but
probably a lot harder to do than porting the XLZW smtp code to
Sendmail and friends.

> 
> Phil
> 

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