Re: Innosoft interoperability

[Chris Newman <[e-mail]>]

This is entirely inappropriate for this group, but I feel forced to
respond in defense.  Dan has taken a quote out of context and posted
misleading information.  I encourage readers to make their own evaluation
of Dan's motivations and veracity in this matter.

On Mon, 4 Aug 1997, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
> Speaking of Innosoft...
> 
> A user just asked whether the latest version of pine---presumably this
> is the famous Innosoft pine-with-subaddresses---works with PMDF 5.0-6.
> 
> Here's Ned Freed's answer: ``The answer is no, it won't work. There are
> countless version dependencies thoughout -- we routinely change all
> sorts of interfaces and data structures during the development of new
> releases of the product.''
> 
> So Innosoft's MUA doesn't even work with two versions of their own MTA.

Pine *is not* Innosoft's MUA.  Pine is a product of the University of
Washington.

When appropriate Internet standards are used, any version of Pine on a
client will interoperate with any version of PMDF on a separate server.

Innosoft maintains a VMS port of Pine for our customers.  This port uses
the same shared libraries that the MTA uses and thus the versions have to
be kept in sync when on the same host.  This is the context for Ned's
quote.

		- Chris