Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[tp at mccall.com]

In article <sean.647630062 at s.ms.uky.edu>, sean at ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
> doug at letni.UUCP (Doug Davis) writes:
> 
> Compressing an article reduces phone time. If compress finds a file
> is bigger after compression, it doesn't compress it. So the phone
> costs really aren't increased by users doing their own compression.

If the user doing compression defeats the compression that would otherwise
be done, than it prevents compress from reducing the costs, which means the
same thing as increasing them. The question to be answered is whether a
compressed uuencoded compressed tar file is smaller or larger than a
compressed shar file, even given that compress will not increase the size
(the extra compress on these being the one done by news when it wants to
send it). I'll leave that little exercise to someone who can do it more
easily.

> Plus, Lempel-Ziv is not the ultimate compressor for certain kinds
> of data.  There's ways of compressing bitmaps, for instance, that
> are a lot more effective.

I believe most of the previous posters on this did say that compressing and
uuencoding a binary (bitmaps certainly qualify) was a valid thing to do.
Just compress and encode the files that need it, though, and shar it up
with the source code.

> I don't see what the problem is. Compress is smart enough to not
> expand files, and it *does* save disk space on the remote site, so
> why complain?

My biggest gripe is that I can't read the stuff to see if I want it. Tom
may post an explanation, but not all posted explanations are useful. The
anonymous contact software has a whole posting describing how to unpack it
and how to build it, with NO information as to what the h*ll it is. Also,
does anyone really think that posting it this way saved anyone any
diskspace, since extra tools were posted to unpack it?

Even good explanations aren't good enough. The rest of you probably don't
care, but I run VMS, and I need to glance at the code to see if it is
useful to me. Some ports are trivial, some are very difficult. At least the
stuff on the ACS software mentioned that it is in perl, which doesn't run
on VMS (at the moment), so I was saved the inordinate hassle of unpacking
that one to find out what it was.

Many people will ignore your posting if they can't unpack it with the tools
immediately at hand, and do so easily. I wonder how many people saw all the
uumerge stuff and the encoded file and just skipped it as being not worth
the trouble to read a bunch of stuff just to figure out how to unpack it.
-- 
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