[253] in Release_7.7_team
Re: telnet -safe as default
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jhawk@MIT.EDU)
Sat Jan 14 23:49:02 1995
From: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 1995 23:48:43 -0500
To: cfields@MIT.EDU
Cc: ghudson@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU, brlewis@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[252] in Release_7.7_team"
Craig writes:
[My criticism of Greg's documentation changes]
> I read his proposal to be, if you do -safe, and it can't do encrypted,
> then it will exit, giving you no telnet connection at all. I think
> that was a subset of your proposal...
Sorry, I believe you're correct; I misread what Greg said there. Sorry...
> > As for the counterargument, that telnet -ax should allow this behavior,
> > that's bogus too, since lots of people type it (because it's shorter),
> > and more importantly, telnet -ax exists outside of the Athena environment
> > (44BSD, CNS's next release, Cray telnet), and shouldn't be monkeyed
> > with...
>
> Then you're saying the telnet -ax behavior we currently have is not the
> same behavior everyone else is using?
No. I'm saying that I expect that eventually (I suppose I neglected to
submit my bug report to anyone other than Athena; I will rectify this
when I finish my development work on telnet over IAP...) the
"mainline" (i.e. K5 and CNS K4) encrypted telnets will support my
change of -ax failing when an encrypted connection is not possible.
As such, changing -safe to do anything other than -ax would be unfortunate,
given that -safe does not exist in the normal scheme of things. Also,
-ax is used by many as an abbreviate for -safe...
I think that having multiple versions of telnet that behave in significantly
different ways is suboptimal :-)
--jhawk
