Re: [idn] Re: 7 bits forever!

["John Stracke" <jstracke@incentivesystems.com>]

D. J. Bernstein wrote:

>It is not reasonable to demand that this
>7-bit garbage be allowed to remain on the network forever, at the
>expense of all future implementors and users.

OK, you're obviously in a better position than I am to appreciate the cost 
to implementors.  But users? Suppose you could streamline qmail by 
dropping support for talking to 7-bit servers.  How do you convince a 
postmaster to install it? The bandwidth cost of having to use 7-bit 
encoding is real, but small; the cost of losing connectivity to sites is 
potentially high.  Worse, it's almost impossible to put an upper bound on 
the cost of lost connectivity.  For a company, it could mean losing 
messages (and sales) from important customers; businesses have failed over 
such things.

For commercial implementors, it's a no-brainer: dropping 7-bit support 
will lose customers, so don't do it.  For open-source implementors such as 
yourself, naturally, things are less clear-cut.

/==============================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer           |
|jstracke@incentivesystems.com   |Incentive Systems, Inc.      |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.      |
|==============================================================|
|"This [OLE] isn't an API, this is a shaggy dog story in C!" --|
|Unknown                                                       |
\==============================================================/