Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[Jim Bacon]

In article <5256 at plains.UUCP> overby at plains.UUCP (Glen Overby) writes:
>In article <15652 at bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) charges:
>>We have recently seen a spate of "source" postings in "uuencoded
>>compressed TAR" form, instead of SHAR or other traditional plain text
>>formats.
>
[stuff deleted]
>
>to which <3114 at psueea.UUCP> kirkenda at eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) confesses:
>> I'm certainly guilty of posting articles in *.tar.Z.uue format.  I'm not
>> entirely happy with it, but I believe there are some valid reasons for
>> using this ugly format...
>
[stuff deleted]
>
>I offer one sugestion: for groups which are source-only, have the gateway
>program pump everything thru 'compress | uuencode' before feeding it to
>Listserv.  I still see no solution for discussion groups which also get
>sources posted to them.
>
>While I'm indicting comp.os.minix, I'd like to also charge comp.binaries.*
>with a similar offense, using arc, zip or zoo instead of compress.
>
>Other Solutions, anyone?

I have been involved with the with FIDOnet on MSDOS for a good number of
years and have suffered the impact of changing "stanadards" for
compression methods.

At the start, ARC was the standard.  Then PKARC came along.  That wasn't
much of a problem, but did cause some confusion.  Then the lawsuits
started flying and we were buried under a slew of new programs, ZIP,
ZOO, and a half dozen others.

Now, I never know what to expect thru the network and about half of my
mail gets lost because I have taken the position that ARC is the
standard on my machine.

I would strongly urge that only a single compression utility be used as
a standard, and for UN*X I would suggest compress.


-- 
Jim Bacon                            | "A computer's attention span is only
Anacom General Corp., CA             |  as long as its extension cord."
jim at anacom1.cpd.com                  |
zardoz!anacom1!jim                   |                                 Anon