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1.1       root        1: From arpa!geoff Wed Jul 19 00:26:22 1989
                      2: From: [email protected]
                      3: Date: 19 Jul 1989 0026-EDT (Wednesday)
                      4: To: research!ches
                      5: 
                      6: Comments on the draft Upas paper of July 18.
                      7: 
                      8: Local authorities probably include Doug McIlroy and Dennis, so don't
                      9: take my word if you are skeptical.
                     10: 
                     11: Punctuation.  I tend to use hyphens to join words of a compound
                     12: adjective, as per The Elements of Style. I would suggest
                     13: "network-specific mailers" (at least thrice), "regular-expression-based
                     14: mini-language", "home-grown networks", "well-understood, and thereby
                     15: reliable mail system", "very short-lived", and "format-specific
                     16: mailer".  In "A Comparison With Sendmail", I would punctuate thusly: "We
                     17: wanted a system that had simpler, and therefore more easily verifiable,
                     18: rewriting rules." (I might also put a hyphen between "easily" and
                     19: "verifiable"). In "Message Routing", there is a period after "translate"
                     20: that should be a comma.
                     21: 
                     22: Spelling.  "envelope" needs a final "e".  "variant" contains no "e"
                     23: (look for "varient").
                     24: 
                     25: Grammar.  To get agreement in tense, I would change "there are many
                     26: implementation changes" to "there have been many implementation
                     27: changes".
                     28: 
                     29: Facts.  Reference 2 (uucp) claims "Unix Programmer's Manual, Seventh
                     30: Edition, Volume 2, Bell Laboratories, October 1978".  Maybe you guys
                     31: have a pre-release, but my volume 2 says "January 1979".  I recall the
                     32: release of Seventh Edition in ~June 1979 just before Usenix (I had just
                     33: phoned Irma Biren to be put on the "V7 interest list" and she said
                     34: `Guess what?  It's just been released today').
                     35: 
                     36: Figures.  Figure 1 shows the progression "convert -> queue -> protocol",
                     37: yet I believe the current SMTP progression is "queue -> convert ->
                     38: protocol" (isn't message-format conversion done at the last moment
                     39: now?).  Figure 2 might (again) mention message-format conversion as
                     40: happening in smtpd and smtp.  For symmetry, you might want to show the
                     41: smtpqer -> queue -> smtp progression on the left side of Figure 2, so
                     42: that one can read the flow of mail in a given protocol family down the
                     43: page.  Also in Figure 2, there is a missing or invisible line from
                     44: /usr/lib/upas/route to the arrow-head attached to smtpqer.  It isn't
                     45: clear to me how much of the diagram is covered by the name "Upas"; uucp
                     46: and relations are clearly excluded, but what about smtp and relations?
                     47: This comes up later, in comparison with sendmail.
                     48: 
                     49: When describing \l, it might be worth explaining how "The name of the
                     50: local machine" is determined (hostname(1), gethostname(2), uuname(1) -l,
                     51: uname(2), etc.), even if just to say "in a machine-dependent way".
                     52: 
                     53: After "If the command does not result in mail delivery", it might be
                     54: worth parenthetically noting that exactly "|" and ">>" perform mail
                     55: delivery.
                     56: 
                     57: In "Message Format Conversion", I would be interested to know how header
                     58: information is used in deriving SMTP destination addresses.  "Outgoing
                     59: SMTP messages must have at least the minimum header information required
                     60: by RFC822"; what if the don't?  Are they dropped, is the missing
                     61: information filled in automatically, or is something else done?
                     62: 
                     63: Re "Concealing Machine Names": I still get mail from dutoit.att.com and
                     64: arpa.att.com, so it might be worth mentioning that machine-hiding can be
                     65: fooled without trying.
                     66: 
                     67: Under "Installation" appears the phrase "most major versions of Unix
                     68: Time Sharing"; is that what you intended, or should it read "most major
                     69: versions of the Unix Time-Sharing System"?
                     70: 
                     71: The third item of "A Comparison With Sendmail" makes sense if "Upas"
                     72: excludes all auxiliaries (translate, smtp and relations, etc.);
                     73: otherwise it is clearly false: Upas now possesses most of the features
                     74: named.
                     75: 

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