USENIX Board Studies UUCP

[Ellie Young]

     At the recent USENIX board meeting in Vienna, USENIX and EUUG agreed to
jointly study UUCP, and I have agreed to be the contact and collection point
for thoughts, proposals, suggestions, and flames.

     Most people would agree that UUCP has many problems.  Compatible versions
are not available throughout the entire UNIX community, and its penetration of
non-UNIX systems is minimal.  Maintaining and administering UUCP threatens the
sanity of even reasonably stable individuals, and is seriously damaging to
UNIX hackers.  The robustness and performance of the transmission protocols is
open to question.  The CPU and disk load that UUCP places on the operating
system can and probably should be improved.  ISO and X.25 compatibility are of
interest to the Europeans.  The list goes on.

     So what can USENIX do about this?  As you recall, a similar series of
discussions about Usenet led to sponsorship of the Stargate experiments and
eventually establishing and spinning off the very successful UUNET service.
Some of the concrete actions that we have discussed are:

      o Sponsoring a public-domain re-implementation of UUCP.

      o Picking up and distributing one of the existing re-implementations.

      o Hiring people to make studies or specific proposals.

As Treasurer of USENIX, I naturally objected to the third of these alter-
natives, which is why I got stuck with doing it.

     In my view, there are several things that a YACP (Yet Another Communica-
tion Protocol) program should do:

      o Be able to send and receive from existing UUCP sites.

      o Be sensitive to the security risks of network communication.

      o Be written for today's machine memories, disks, and network traffic.

      o Talk at least a few other protocols; ideally, make it easy to add new
        protocols through streams or dynamic linking.

      o Allow administration of incoming and outgoing traffic that is both
        easy and helpful for the naive, and not sadistic to the full-time ad-
        ministrator.

      o Be widely available, even for non-UNIX licensees, through some form of
        flexible licensing scheme.

      o Be robust enough that the hackings of cretins not disrupt the network,
        and produce clear error messages.

     From the organizational point of view, there are also some non-technical
questions:

      o What should we do, in detail?  Can we do the work in stages?

      o When we decide what to do, who does it?

      o How much does it cost?  How do we pay for it?

      o How do we distribute the final product?  On what terms?

      o If distributed in source form, how do we keep people from ``improv-
        ing'' it into incompatibility or worse?

      o Is this really the way we should be spending our money?

     USENIX is fortunate to have significant financial reserves, and can af-
ford to do this project right, if we decide to do it at all.  That is where
you come in.  We would like to hear from our members on all aspects of this
project - technical, organizational, the works.  Alternative projects are also
gratefully accepted.  Please send mail to:

        scj at usenix.org

We will be discussing this project at the next board meeting in January, and
hope to decide then how (or whether) to move forward.

                                                                 Steve Johnson