On 6/13/2010 8:19 PM, Ned Freed wrote:
The two exceptions occur ... - it's functiona
doesn't correspdond to any of the MUA/MTA/MSA/etc. roles. In the latter case
fetchmail is acting as an MTA -
...
As for whether or not it's confusing, I suppose it is, but that's hardly the
fault of the standards documents. For better or worse, someone decided to
write a program that is capable of assuming a variety of roles, some of them
fairly obscure in nature, and then the people who wrote it apperently
didn't understand how their own creation fit into the email taxonomy.
None of this makes the present definitions of the roles of email agents any
less clear - indeed, what it means more than anything is that the
definitions need to be kept as clean and crisp as possible
Exactly.
Architecture is an abstraction that is mapped to software according to the
arcane organizational or personal processes of product definition.
Serious discussion about architecture is regularly derailed by confusing the
distinction between architecture and software, even among experienced folk.
A given bit of software well might choose to provide a subset of functions from
one architectural component and a subset from another. (More typically, it will
provide the core from one and some or all of the core from another.) That
particular choices are made for particular software might provide feedback to
the designers of the architecture, about whether they got things right or wrong.
It also might /not/.
Careening off of a recent private discussion, I'll offer the example of the
early Arpanet. The packet switches, called Interface Message Processors (IMP)
were not "routers" in the Internet sense, but they did do packet store and
forward and the routing to determine forwarding. BBN added some hardware,
memory and software to an IMP, to produce a single-box solution for sites
needing terminal access. (The hardware was a serial line driver). The result,
called a Terminal Interrface Processor (TIP) still had all of the IMP software
and functionality /and role/. The fact that it did more than an IMP did not
magically make it stop being an IMP.
Nor would it suddenly become an Internet Router just because someone
(erroneously) wrote in the documentation that it was one...
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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