Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Amos Shapir
amos at taux01.nsc.com
Wed Jul 11 05:44:40 AEST 1990
In article <3114 at psueea.UUCP> you write:
|> * Crucial source format conversions such as CR/LF replacement, fixed
|> or variable record encoding, ASCII/EBCDIC translation, etc, which
|> automatically take place in plain text news/notes postings, are
|> again circumvented; users in alien environments are left with
|> raw UNIX format bitstreams to deal with.
|
|But I don't want the network to translate my articles! When I post an article,
|there's a good chance that it will go from a UNIX machine, through BITNET, to
|another UNIX machine. Because it went through BITNET, it will have been
|translated from ASCII into EBCDIC and back into ASCII. This translation may
|leave scars: some characters may have been transliterated incorrectly, long
|lines may be silently truncated or split, and whitespace may be changed. And
|all of this is happenning on machines that I have no control over!
|
The point was, what happens to those who use the BITNET/EBCDIC machines?
The fact is, they are more numerous than UNIX users.
|Certainly, when I post an article, I do so because I want to make my source
|code available to people. Anything that limits the availability should be
|viewed with a critical eye. Uudecode and compress fall into that catagory.
|So does the BITNET protocol. A user who lacks uuencode and compress can get
|them from somewhere. A user who has only a BITNET feed is stuck.
Precisely for this reason, it is better to write you source in a way that
it wouldn't be so sensitive to such changes.
--
Amos Shapir amos at taux01.nsc.com, amos at nsc.nsc.com
National Semiconductor (Israel) P.O.B. 3007, Herzlia 46104, Israel
Tel. +972 52 522408 TWX: 33691, fax: +972-52-558322 GEO: 34 48 E / 32 10 N
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