this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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SMTP is a terrible protocol. Text based for sending effectively binary data with complex header wrapping and "generate a random delimiter" framing. We really need a HTTP/2 of SMTP.
That being said I agree that it exists and works. The biggest blocker to more IM-style communication is largely the UI and user expectations. I have no problem having quick back-and-forths over email but most people don't expect it.
Fair enough. Sending binary data over SMTP adds a lot of overhead, because it all has to be encoded. We should fix that.
Honestly my biggest complaint is header wrapping. Technically you need to wrap lines at 998 bytes (not that any reasonable server actually cares). But in order to wrap a header you need to add spaces (because you can only break a line after whitespace). But where spaces are unimportant depends on each specific header. So you need to have custom wrapping rules for each header.
In practice no one does this. They just hope that headers naturally have spaces or break them in random locations (corrupting them) because the protocol was too stupid.
Binary protocols are just so much simpler. Give the length, then the data. Problem solved. Maybe we could even use a standard format for structured headers. But that would be harder to do while maintaining backwards compatibility.