Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[Bill Silvert]

In article <3114 at psueea.UUCP> kirkenda at eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) writes:
>Some text has been edited out of the following quotes...
ditto

>> * 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.

Not all common tools are "available", in the sense that they can be
recovered from archive sites and recompiled, on all machines.  For
example, I cannot get 16-bit uncompression on my MS-DOS machine, and the
uncompress I ported to my obsolete Unix box is pretty flaky.

I support sticking with shar as much as possible, since all you really
need is a text editor to pull shar archives apart.

The translation problem that Steve refers to could be solved by
including an ASCII table at the head of each shar, so that
transpositions of characters could be identified.  This sort of thing is
done by the Dumas version of uuencode.


-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
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