A readable, robust encoding for source postings

[Rhys Weatherley]

In <1990Dec30.170302.21665 at druid.uucp> darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:

>In article <1990Dec29.114801.5895 at Daisy.EE.UND.AC.ZA> Alan P. Barrett writes:
>> [...]
>>I think that the correct way to fix this is to use an encoding that is
>>both readable and robust.  A version of shar that does stuff like
>>encoding tabs as \t and wrapping lines in a reversible way would do it.
>
>I posted my genfiles program which I hoped would be a jumpimg off point for
>such an effort.  Has anyone looked at it and have suggestions to enhance
>the protocols I suggested?

I missed the original discussion, so I may be repeating things, but
the central problem I think there will be in getting a new transmission
standard off the ground is actually making it a standard :-).  unshar,
uuencode and the like are very widespread, and trying to shake their
ground may be very hard.  Maybe in the interim a cut-down "encoder"
is needed that can be wrapped-up in a shar archive, and will be unpacked,
compiled and run to unpack the rest.  e.g. the shar archive could look
something like this:

		... head information ...
		sed ... >/tmp/decode.c <<EOF
		... source code for decode.c ...
		EOF
		cc -o /tmp/decode /tmp/decode.c
		sed ... | /tmp/decode >file <<EOF 
		... file contents ...
		EOF

It should be possible to get a very compact decoding program that could
be wrapped up with the shell archives.  Won't solve all the problems
but may help, as well as its being reasonably compatible with the
existing shar archiving system.  Well, that's my thoughts on the matter,
what do you think?

Rhys.

P.S. D'Arcy, could you tell us where your program may be found, since
     I missed it first time around.

+===============================+==================================+
||  Rhys Weatherley             |  The University of Queensland,  ||
||  rhys at batserver.cs.uq.oz.au  |  Australia.  G'day!!            ||
+===============================+==================================+