A readable, robust encoding for source postings

[Alan P. Barrett]

In article <MEISSNER.90Dec28123513 at curley.osf.org>, meissner at osf.org
(Michael Meissner) writes:
> On the other hand, ever since I've switched to compress + uuencode +
> shar for shipping out large sets of patches, I've had fewer people
> complain about news/mail trashing the file or subsequent patches
> failing, since some 'helpful' intermediary decided to put a newline in
> column 79, or change tabs to spaces, or....

I sympathise, having been on the receiving end of a feed that changed
tabs to spaces, or appended extra spaces to the ends of some lines, or
inserted extra newlines, or broke messages into lots of little pieces
without labelling the parts properly.  (This is no reflection on the
people who provided that feed -- they did their best.)

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.
In fact, there was a lot of discussion on this topic here several months
ago.  Sorry, I don't remember details, but I thought that somebody was
going to do some real work on coming up with a suitable standard?

--apb
Alan Barrett, Dept. of Electronic Eng., Univ. of Natal, Durban, South Africa
Internet: barrett at ee.und.ac.za (or %ee.und.ac.za at saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu)
UUCP: m2xenix!quagga!undeed!barrett    PSI-Mail: PSI%(6550)13601353::BARRETT