Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[Glen Overby]

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.

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...

> When I transmit a file, I want it to be received unchanged.  If it must be
> translated to suit the receiver's environment, then that translation should
> be done explicitly by the reciever, not magically by some machine halfway
> between here & there.

Both Steve and I are Frequent Flamers on comp.os.minix.  This group
is gatewayed to a LISTSERV list on that bastion of computer networks,
Bitnet.  I think we've all heard the rhetoric about what Bitnet does to
source files, but if not just ask any one of us who have been unfortunate
enough to have once been a BITNaut.

Every time someone posts a source file which is not uuencoded, they get
flamed by a dozen BITNauts who feel ripped off for not having gotten a good
copy.

But In article <1990Jul10.203015.27282 at eci386.uucp> woods at eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods
claims:
> [...]  It is rare
>to find sites mangling news which is only passing through these days.
>The translation usually occurs either during the storing of news, or
>in the retrieval by the newsreader.

I recall five parts of a Minix upgrade being munged last Christmas Eve (yes,
1989) between vu.nl and nodak.edu, and I think all of it's path was over the
Internet.

The rationalization for compressing is to compensate for the expansion
caused by uuencoding, whose rationalization is, in an acronym, BITNET.
Fix the Bitnet problem, and you rid the world of most of the reasons for
uuencoding.

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?
-- 
		Glen Overby	<overby at plains.nodak.edu>
	uunet!plains!overby (UUCP)  overby at plains (Bitnet)