Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl

[Kent Paul Dolan]

ed at dah.sub.org (Ed Braaten) writes:

> Kent Paul Dolan writes:

>> Uuencoded files have nice, regular, short lines, free of control
>> characters, that transit gateways and news software well. I don't
>> want to tell someone with a 132 character wide screen who's trying to
>> decide whether it's worth the pain and torment to publish their code
>> for the benefit of the net that s/he can only write code in the left
>> 3/5ths or so of the screen because the USENet news software is
>> braindead.

> That "braindead" USENET news software happens to connect a world full
> of disparate computer systems and their users. It is this connectivity
> that makes USENET so wonderful. Good *source* files have nice,
> regular, short lines, free of control characters, that transit
> gateways and news software well. ;-)

All as unarguable as motherhood and apple pie. Now you go tell Joe or
Suzie GreatSoftwareHacker that that spiffy 132 character wide terminal
s/he bought to write code is such a hazard to the net that we _insist_
s/he stop using the right 52 character positions so that _we_ aren't
inconvenienced dealing with the free efforts of his/her skullsweat. If I
were Kent GreatSoftwareHacker, I'd suggest you write the damn code
yourself, if you can't cope with my coding style, or tolerate posting
methods that will transport it.

(And notice I _do_ format my postings narrow to support followup
widening; I work on an 80 character screen myself; my last 132 character
wide screen was at a job I held in 1979.)

Fact is, software comes from folks with _lots_ of coding styles and
environments, and we either drop our parochialism, or do without their
code.

Back to the origin of this dispute, the tcl software as posted, packed
into about 392Kbytes as a single file in an lharc archive, 444Kbytes
with the files shredded out separately and packed in an lharc archive,
and something like 1200Kbytes (from "du") as an unarchived directory
tree in a BSD 4.3 file system, and probably 10% more than that as a
shar. If I weren't so fond of pulling out single files from an archive,
I'd start packing them with cpio or tar and lharcing that; 12% better
storage efficiency from saved header overhead, and from being able to
continue common string packing across files, isn't chickenfeed, when, as
here, you're talking about .6Gbyte of floppy disk archives.

As I noted in an earlier posting, it is a _large_ benefit to have the
sources sit in the news spool file at half the size, which was the case
with tcl as a uuencoded, compressed cpio archive.  The 600K saved is a
big chunk of our local, hmmm

Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/gd4f             231133   99129  108890    48%    /usr/spool/news

231Mbyte spool file; replicate that 20 or so times with other source
group postings, and you're talking a day saved for expires. I'd like that.


Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>