Re: [dmarc-ietf] UNCOL and Reversing modifications from mailing lists

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Wei Chuang  <[e-mail]> said:
>I saw Ale's draft draft-vesely-dmarc-mlm-transform
><https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-vesely-dmarc-mlm-transform> in
>the ARC list, and wanted to discuss some of the ideas. ...

Please humor me for a moment while I turn the clock way back to 1958.

Fortran and Cobol had shown that compilers worked, and people were busy
writing compilers for lots of languages for lots of computers.  But that
was a daunting amount of work, N languages for M computers is NxM compilers.

Mel Conway, best known for the law "Organizations, who design
systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the
communication structures of these organizations", published a paper
proposing a Universal Computer Oriented Language or UNCOL.  The front
end of each compiler would translate from Fortran or whatever to UNCOL,
and the back ends would translate from UNCOL to IBM 7070 machine code
or whatever, reducing the work from NxM to N+M.

Work started with great enthusiasm in the early 1960s, and people
produced UNCOLs that could handle one or two input languages, and one
or two output machine codes, and reported great success. But they
found that every new input language or output machine required more
and more special cases which swamped whatever was supposed to be
common, and UNCOL experienced heat death, was quietly shelved and forgotten. 

The Open Software Foundation had an ANDF, Architecture Neutral
Distribution Format around 1989.  They were very offended when I said it
sounded just like UNCOL, but it died the same way.

This proposal is UNCOL for mailing lists. Can you come up with a demo
that handles a few common changes that Mailman makes? Sure. How about
if you add the slightly different changes that Sympa makes? Probably.
What about LISTSERV and phpList and ezmlm and listproc and groups.io
and Google Groups and Yahoo Groups and body headers and MIME footers
and all the other things that mailing lists do?  Maybe not.

Uh, perhaps we could focus on how to get ARC more widely adopted,
since it has the advantage of not making any unrealistic assumptions
about what changes lists might make.

R's,
John