Re: deleting telnet/telnetd

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:03:27 +0000
    From:        David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20181219210327.GA5063%netbsd.org@localhost>

  | But it can't be fixed and sooner or later someone's going to
  | find a critical problem with it.

Nothing can't be fixed.   It all depends what the objective is.   If you
have decided that you don't like the way it is written, and want to
change it all, then yes, that would be difficult, especially, as you say,
getting access to all the wierd other-end nodes is not easy.

But if the objective is simply to deal with any "critical problems",
ideally in advace, that's a whole different thing, and not nearly so
daunting.

I'm not willing to rewrite it, but I have looked at the code (long in the
past now) and while it is a little unusual in some ways, we know that
it does work in general - they may be some holes (a lot of old code
had that) but it is not going to take a redesign to fix.   If there are some
parts that don't actually work, and aren't easy to fix, those can be
excised - clearly if anything like that exists, it isn't being used.

Of course, if someone does create a new, equally fiunctional, client
and server combination, that would be fine too.

kre