Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[Greg A. Woods]

In article <3114 at psueea.UUCP> kirkenda at eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) writes:
> In article <15652 at bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
> >We have recently seen a spate of "source" postings in "uuencoded
> >compressed TAR" form, instead of SHAR or other traditional plain text
> >formats.
> 
> I'm certainly guilty of posting articles in *.tar.Z.uue format.  I'm not
> entirely happy with it, but I believe there are some valid reasons for
> using this ugly format...

ARGH!  ALL YOUR REASONS WERE PREVIOUSLY INVALIDATED BY STEVE!  Did you
read what he wrote?  Did you understand it?  IMHO there are *NO* valid
reasons for using this ugly format, and you certainly didn't uncover
any in your article!

> So sites with compressed newsfeeds don't care a whole lot, but those with
> uncompressed feeds DO care.  Any sites with little free disk space also benefit
> from the compression.

Sites without compressed newsfeeds know what they are getting, and
have chosen to do it this way.  You cannot pre-suppose that you are
giving them a helping hand by compressing your postings beforehand.

Are you trying to tell me that you can waste the bandwidth caused by
the failure of compress on large batches between the many normal sites
for the very few who have chosen not to use compress for some arcane
reason?

Sites with little free disk space will *not* gain appreciably from
a few obscure people compressing and uuencoding their postings.  If
disk space is that tight, those sites will have other, much more
efficient ways of dealing with the problem.  In fact, these sites may
actually be impacted greatly by such postings, as every news reader
who finds interest in the article may take it upon himself to un-pack
his own private copy to see what it's all about!

> > * 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 transmit a file, I want it to be received unchanged.  If it must be
> translated to suit the receiver's environment, then that translation should
> be done explicitly by the reciever, not magically by some machine halfway
> between here & there.

That is usually the case, and what Steve was refering to.  It is rare
to find sites mangling news which is only passing through these days.
The translation usually occurs either during the storing of news, or
in the retrieval by the newsreader.

Meanwhile, your ugly format has destroyed the automatic translation
capabilities of those sites which need it, and forced the end users to
individually convert your postings by hand (or with the help of one of
the tools Steve refered to, provided they can be made to work in the
environment in question).

If your code is so gross as to contain escape sequences, or 8-bit
data, then you deserve the "conversion"!  :-)  It will remain the case
for quite some time that any files containing anything but the 96
printable characters in the ASCII set will be subject to change, even
on UNIX to UNIX links, both with mail, and with news.  Since anything
but the 96 printable chars isn't printable by definition, how could it
be source in the first place?  If your files are riddled with such
"garbage", please feel free to uuencode them, but please post them to
an arbitrary binaries group.

> > * The format presupposes the existence of decoding tools which may
> >   or may not be present in a given environment.
> 
> They should be.  People have been posting them, and they're available at
> archive sites.

Just because they exist for UNIX environments, does not mean they are
available at all sites, nor that they are available for other
environments, nor that the end user can build and install them.

> A user who lacks uuencode and compress can get
> them from somewhere.

That's the attitude which has caused much frustration to new UNIX
users.  So many people have been turned off UNIX and usenet because
some non-thinking guru said it was easy to snarf something fancy from
some far remote site, and port it.  Meanwhile the new fellow still
hasn't got his modem working well!

> If there was no such thing as BITNET then I would probably use shar.

Shar neither helps, nor hinders, with transmission through BITNET.

Finally, I'm curious just how many BITNET sites are in the top 1000
that Brian Reid posts.  What is the total percentage of usenet traffic
which flows through them?  Are any of them currently mangling news
they pass through?
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

woods@{eci386,gate,robohack,ontmoh,tmsoft}.UUCP
+1-416-443-1734 [h]  +1-416-595-5425 [w]    VE3-TCP	Toronto, Ontario CANADA