uucp sitenames

[lauren at RAND-UNIX.ARPA]

From:  Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren at RAND-UNIX.ARPA>

I'd like to clarify the issues of uucp sitename length a little.  Various
versions of uucp have different rules for name truncation.  Some use
7 chars (the majority) some use 6 (some System V uucp's--this was
apparently an error that crept into a major distribution) and some
don't truncate at all since they use separate directories for every
site.  These variations cause substantial compatibility confusion in 
some situations, but they can usually be worked out.  For the purposes
of sitename registration, the UUCP Project considers that sitenames
must be unique in the first 6 characters (to deal with those "broken"
System V uucp's) in order to be registered.  However, sitenames may
be LONGER than 6 chars (or even 7 chars) so long as they remain UNIQUE
in the first 6.  So, for example, "microsoft" is OK, even though it
is 9 characters long--some software simply truncates the name.

Eventually, under a domain-based system, many of the name uniqueness
restrictions (for the domain-based addresses) will probably be lifted,
though the underlying site transport name will still need to meet
uniqueness restrictions to allow full intersite compatibility.

--Lauren--