Text 2800, 72 rader
Skriven 2008-04-03 09:19:08 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
   Kommentar till text 2746 av Ross Cassell (1:123/456)
Ärende: INA
===========
Hello Ross,

On Tuesday April 01 2008 22:33, you wrote to me:

 RC>>> You cant see into my head (sound familiar?), therefore you do
 RC>>> not really know why I developed it.

 MV>> There is more to "why it was developed" than just your personal
 MV>> motives. Had there not been a significant pool of inflated egos,
 MV>> your alternative for using the system name field would have
 MV>> fallen on barren ground.

 RC> I had no "personal motives".. Good grief, read what you are saying
 RC> here.

I think you are seeing more than there is...

Ok, that may have been an unfortunate way of phrasing it. What I meant to say
was "there is more to 'why it was developed' than your motives".

You were not the first to propose an alternative for using the system name
field. There was Frank Vest's proposal to use the location field with a '#'
characater and my proposal to use the first listed protocol flag for the
default information and let it carry over by default to the following flags
that had no info of their own. Neither of those made it.

 RC> I do want to be properly creditted for the flag, that is true, but you
 RC> agree with that as evidenced from your netmail a week ago.

Which you have not answered yet...

 RC> There was a situation I encountered as R18C from a NC in my region
 RC> that caused nodelist issues that prompted me to think up the flag,

The INA flag does nothing more than provide a place for storing the default
fqdn or IP number. Since there already was such a place; the system name field,
it solved no *technical* problem that was not already solved.

 RC> but I also agree with the fact that people want the system name field
 RC> to stay the same without changing it over to a FQDN.

Right, the only problem that was solved by the INA flag was the problem of the
egos of those that did not want to sacrifice the system name field. A social
problem.

 RC> The flag had no political or personal motivations, it was proposed to
 RC> address a problem and presented as a possible solution for that
 RC> problem and as it turned out, for others.

Maybe *you* had no political motivation, but that does not change the fact that
it was a political solution to a social problem. No more.

That, plus that it saddled the programmers with the burden of adding extra code
to support *yet another* method of extracting the connect info from the
nodelist and that it would leave users of abandonware in the cold, made me
oppose it at first.

But... I can also see when it is time to stop swimming against the stream and
go with the flow. So I upgraded my programmes to care for another class of
flags: IP info carrying flags. Not rocket science, but not trivial either.

In short: I gave in.


That does not mean I changed my opinion about it being a political solution to
a social problem....


Cheers, Michiel

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