Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
David Dick
drd at siia.mv.com
Wed Jul 11 10:20:14 AEST 1990
In <15652 at bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
>We have recently seen a spate of "source" postings in "uuencoded
>compressed TAR" form, instead of SHAR or other traditional plain text
>formats. Now, possibly in response, we are seeing tools to manipulate
>this format posted. This is a bad trend! Let's not encourage it
>further.
> But the price for this is heavy:
> [ list of significant reasons omitted ]
This is the biggie!
> * The format presupposes the existence of decoding tools which may
> or may not be present in a given environment. Non-UNIX users who
> lack some of the automated extraction facilities we take for
> granted -- but who can still hand separate a few simple SHAR's into
> something useful -- are left out in the cold.
>These objections are not just quibbles -- they cut to the heart of the
>question of what a worldwide source text network is supposed to be
>about. News is not mail; news is not a BBS. The "advantages" of
>condensing source postings into gibberish are not worth the drawbacks.
As the net expands to encompass a larger and more diverse audience
the familiarity with arcane encoding methods becomes rarified.
The whole point of the original "shar" was that it only assumed
a shell and a few commands which everyone on the fledgling USENET
had.
Even among the cognoscenti propogation of new tools and processing
methods is not guaranteed; the time pressures of a job can interfere!
I think making a significant change in distribution procedures for
the benefit of one adjunct to USENET (BITNET), to the disadvantage of much
of the rest of the net, is a bad idea.
David Dick
Software Innovations, Inc. [the Software Moving Company (sm)]
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