From arpa!geoff Wed Jul 19 00:26:22 1989 From: geoff@utstat.toronto.edu Date: 19 Jul 1989 0026-EDT (Wednesday) To: research!ches Comments on the draft Upas paper of July 18. Local authorities probably include Doug McIlroy and Dennis, so don't take my word if you are skeptical. Punctuation. I tend to use hyphens to join words of a compound adjective, as per The Elements of Style. I would suggest "network-specific mailers" (at least thrice), "regular-expression-based mini-language", "home-grown networks", "well-understood, and thereby reliable mail system", "very short-lived", and "format-specific mailer". In "A Comparison With Sendmail", I would punctuate thusly: "We wanted a system that had simpler, and therefore more easily verifiable, rewriting rules." (I might also put a hyphen between "easily" and "verifiable"). In "Message Routing", there is a period after "translate" that should be a comma. Spelling. "envelope" needs a final "e". "variant" contains no "e" (look for "varient"). Grammar. To get agreement in tense, I would change "there are many implementation changes" to "there have been many implementation changes". Facts. Reference 2 (uucp) claims "Unix Programmer's Manual, Seventh Edition, Volume 2, Bell Laboratories, October 1978". Maybe you guys have a pre-release, but my volume 2 says "January 1979". I recall the release of Seventh Edition in ~June 1979 just before Usenix (I had just phoned Irma Biren to be put on the "V7 interest list" and she said `Guess what? It's just been released today'). Figures. Figure 1 shows the progression "convert -> queue -> protocol", yet I believe the current SMTP progression is "queue -> convert -> protocol" (isn't message-format conversion done at the last moment now?). Figure 2 might (again) mention message-format conversion as happening in smtpd and smtp. For symmetry, you might want to show the smtpqer -> queue -> smtp progression on the left side of Figure 2, so that one can read the flow of mail in a given protocol family down the page. Also in Figure 2, there is a missing or invisible line from /usr/lib/upas/route to the arrow-head attached to smtpqer. It isn't clear to me how much of the diagram is covered by the name "Upas"; uucp and relations are clearly excluded, but what about smtp and relations? This comes up later, in comparison with sendmail. When describing \l, it might be worth explaining how "The name of the local machine" is determined (hostname(1), gethostname(2), uuname(1) -l, uname(2), etc.), even if just to say "in a machine-dependent way". After "If the command does not result in mail delivery", it might be worth parenthetically noting that exactly "|" and ">>" perform mail delivery. In "Message Format Conversion", I would be interested to know how header information is used in deriving SMTP destination addresses. "Outgoing SMTP messages must have at least the minimum header information required by RFC822"; what if the don't? Are they dropped, is the missing information filled in automatically, or is something else done? Re "Concealing Machine Names": I still get mail from dutoit.att.com and arpa.att.com, so it might be worth mentioning that machine-hiding can be fooled without trying. Under "Installation" appears the phrase "most major versions of Unix Time Sharing"; is that what you intended, or should it read "most major versions of the Unix Time-Sharing System"? The third item of "A Comparison With Sendmail" makes sense if "Upas" excludes all auxiliaries (translate, smtp and relations, etc.); otherwise it is clearly false: Upas now possesses most of the features named.