Faces database reorganization.

Mark Shand (shand@prl.dec.com)
Thu, 4 Apr 91 10:23:30 +0200

> } eventually thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of users. Unless
> } X-face:s become more important than the on-line databases ...

I'm really against the proliferation of face databases because it just
doesn't scale. In my opinion we should be promoting X-Face: header
lines. I don't want to have the face of everyone in the known universe
stored at my site, and I'm at a big site, we don't really care about
disk, what about the poor sucker who has a handful of locally
administered machines who doesn't want to devote
(100000 usenet users * 1 Kbyte) = 100 Meg
to a face database.

Eons ago I had an /etc/hosts file, it grew and grew, it became
unworkable so now I have nameservers. Every so often I have difficult
connecting from machine A in France to machine B in Australia because
machine C in Palo Alto is down, but basically it works. A lot of work
went into the nameserver protocol, we could conceivably embark on a
similar path with faces--I see hints of it in these faceserver
suggestions. But why bother? X-Face: is an elegant solution.

Stop the rot, include an X-Face: today!

Mark Shand