Subj : Nodelist Thoughts?
To : Jeff Smith
From : Oli
Date : Sat Oct 24 2020 06:49 pm
Jeff wrote (2020-10-22):
JS> Hello everybody!
JS> I have seen questions and differing thoughts on the use of certain
JS> nodelist flags and their preferred or correct usage. A couple such
JS> flags are INA and IBN and how each should be used to specify nodelist
JS> connectivity data. In looking through the current nodelist I see those
JS> two flags used in a couple different ways.
JS> Thoughts on which and why?
The I?? flags standard is unnecessarily complicated, because someone thought it would be clever to invent different combination of the flags to save a few bytes in the nodelist. But in the real nodelist people often waste 4 bytes with the combination "INA:domain,IBN" (which could also be written as "IBN:domain"). The net result of this is additional complexity for the nodelist parser and the user without any real world savings (which wouldn't matter anyway).
To keep it simple, just ignore the INA flag and use
IBN:domain
or
IBN:domain:port (if your mailer is listening on another port than 24554)
or
IBN:domain,IFC:domain,...
(as there are practically no ifcico-only or EMSI/telnet-only nodes and binkp is the standard FTN TCP/IP protocol, IBN:domain[:port] is all we need).
