Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl

[Kent Paul Dolan]

tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
> karl at sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:

>>Enclosed is the help file for anyone who is having trouble unpacking Tcl.

>If people would just post source to the source newsgroups, instead of
>this unreadable binary crap, no help file would be necessary.

Well, "unreadable" is a bit much, Karl was very helpful in email helping
me find the tools to unpack tcl.

The packaging was justified I think by the more than 50% savings in the
size of the compressed, uuencoded file over the uncompressed original;
tcl unpacks into nearly 1200 1K blocks of files.

Lots of software doesn't transit the news system well in source form, even
in shars; the extra long lines promoted by both C and awk programming
styles, embedded control characters in the clear text version, and transit
between EBCDIC and ASCII hosts can all cause unencoded files to be damaged
by software problems in the news software (and one must be careful in the
choice of uuencodes to survive the third danger intact).  As the net becomes
wider and the gateways more diverse, naked or shar-ed source has less and
less chance of arriving intact, so probably more and more source files will 
transit the net in compressed encoded form as time goes on.  No sense getting
abusive about that.

I don't think complaining about the packaging is fair if the product
arrives intact because of it, but Karl's choice of cpio over tar was
unfortunate. At any rate, as he indicated in his posting, the
comp.sources.unix archive pax, in volume 17, does indeed allow
compilation of a cpio (clone?) that successfully unpacks tcl; I just
finished doing just that.

Remember, almost nowhere on the net do the *.sources.* files arrive
without having been compressed somewhere along the way; seeing them
delivered to you in a compressed format merely defers the final
unpacking to you, at some cost in convenience but benefit in size and
robustness of transport. No one was going to eyeball that whole
1.2Mbytes plus packaging before deciding whether to save it off and
unpack it in any case, and Karl did provide an introduction of sorts to
the software's purpose.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>