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On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 08:18:08PM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> But why not ssh?

Because history matters.

Just because we[1]'ve learned from our mistakes with stuff like
sendmail (and, I'd argue, lpd) and don't make this assumption about
new things, there's entrenched software that *does* make the
assumption about a few things, and it's really much less painful to
have a graceful way out for the real world. Imho, anyway. And
mailwrapper really is a graceful solution!

Note that ssh very puporsely takes the same arguments and can
act-alike for rsh(1) (and kin), including the incredibly bone-headed
"forgot the :"[2] on scp(1). So it can be a drop in replacement.
Kind of like how Postfix and exim have sendmail(1) dropins. And how
LPRng and CUPS have lp{,r,q,rm}(1) dropins. So the real question is,
"should we have an rwrapper", isn't it? ;^> (NO! Obviously not!
SECSH isn't anywhere near the same protocol! Ah, but lpd
replacements DO speak the same protocol, and some extra ones too!)

Also, it's been less than a year that you could reliably assume a
commercial Unix had an ssh(1) (yeah, we've had it for a long time,
so what; we're not Solaris, nor are we Irix, nor are we SCO, nor are
we Tru64, nor are we a blameable vendor) by default, if you can even
safely make that assumption now, so no commercial software vendors
have gotten in the habit yet. Hopefully, they won't. But do you
really expect that NetBSD's refusing to accomodate open source lpd
replacements would deter them from doing so if they're going to?

[1] That is, "Unix sysadmins and users".

[2] Why can't we just assume that the last argument is a hostname or
IP address? What good reason has {r,s}cp to play cp(1) for me? Is
this with the idea that we don't need NFS if we replace cp(1) with
it? What if I want to end useful files in a :? C'mon now...

--=20
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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