Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl

[Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR]

As quoted from <1990Dec27.071632.7272 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> by xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan):
+---------------
| tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
| > karl at sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
| >>Enclosed is the help file for anyone who is having trouble unpacking Tcl.
| >If people would just post source to the source newsgroups, instead of
| >this unreadable binary crap, no help file would be necessary.
| 
| I don't think complaining about the packaging is fair if the product
| arrives intact because of it, but Karl's choice of cpio over tar was
| unfortunate. At any rate, as he indicated in his posting, the
| comp.sources.unix archive pax, in volume 17, does indeed allow
| compilation of a cpio (clone?) that successfully unpacks tcl; I just
| finished doing just that.
+---------------

There's also afio.  Also, since you're so hip on getting savings, cpio doesn't
waste space making sure everything is on a 512-byte boundary.  (In a large
archive, this *can* make a difference.)

+---------------
| Remember, almost nowhere on the net do the *.sources.* files arrive
| without having been compressed somewhere along the way; seeing them
| delivered to you in a compressed format merely defers the final
| unpacking to you, at some cost in convenience but benefit in size and
| robustness of transport. No one was going to eyeball that whole
+---------------

No benefit in size, I fear.  Compress in a pipeline can't do its usual sanity
checks; "compress file; uuencode file.Z file.Z | compress > file.uu.Z" actually
results in file.uu.Z being considerably larger than file.Z, because an already-
compressed file *expands* and uuencode also expands the file somewhat (but
doesn't make it compressable again).  Compressed uuencodes actually waste
considerable space/time.

I suspect that the only real solution to "robustness" issues will be X.400 or
an equivalent.

++Brandon
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