Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl

[Steve Lamont]

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....

Good point.  This isn't a religious issue with me, however, as a previous
poster pointed out, the whole world isn't running UN*X.  For postings that
make sense *only* in a UN*X environment, compress and uuencode clearly make
sense, since they're common within that environment.  For other sources that
have applicability to other environments (graphics ray tracers, for instance),
it would seem that a cleartext approach would achieve the widest
dissemination most easily.

My gut feeling is that rather than go to compression and uuencoding, for most
cases, fixing the shar wrapper to deal with long lines would be the most
straightforward answer.

Again, however, the reason why I've poked my nose into this issue is somewhat
orthogonal to the compression/nocompression discussion.  I'm more interested
in encouraging those who do post sources to include some cleartext explanatory
note identifying just what it is that they're posting.  On more than one
occasion, I've gone through the effort to unshar and even build something that
I found was of no interest.  I'm certain that I've passed by postings that
were of interest but the name was too cryptic for me to decipher.

Anyhow, thanks for the consideration.

							spl (the p stands for
							previous poster
							pointed??? I think
							I've just overdrawn my
							'p' ration for
							today...)
-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- 1882p at cc.nps.navy.mil -- a guest on network.ucsd.edu
NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93943
What is truth and what is fable, where is Ruth and where is Mabel?
                       - Director/producer John Amiel, heard on NPR