Many years ago, someone on Uncensored was playing around with SCO and asked, "What the heck is 'micnet' and what is it for? As far as I can tell, all it does is duplicate the functionality of UUCP." And they were correct: the micnet code continued to exist in the descendents of Xenix long after no one was using it. Everyone had long since implemented UUCP, even within the halls of Microsoft and SCO. This is the feeling I am now getting as I remove IGnet from the Citadel system. It served its purpose, but aside from Uncensored and Dogpound, no one was using it. And it raised the question: if Citadel speaks all of the standard protocols, why do Citadel sites need a special protocol to connect to each other? The answer, quite simply, is that they don't. Giant hunks of code are now removed. An entire layer of complexity is gone. All sorts of cruft that made assumptions about dialup BBS and UUCP networking from 30 years ago has finally been removed. There is only one network now: the standard TCP/IP Internet. Mail is always SMTP, syndication is always RSS, and we might throw in more robust NNTP eventually.
I'm sad to see IGnet go away, but the gigantic reduction of complexity in the code more than makes up for it.
