Beyond shar (Re: shars and security concerns.)

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <H9631XCxds13 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I also agree that shars are getting out of hand. "shar" was a good idea for
>its time, but it's gotten too big, too fast. I think it's long past the
>time for a standard text archive format on Usenet.
>
>I vote for the Software Tools format:

The reason shar's were such a hot idea was that you could unwrap
shar's with tools you knew you had on the receiving side already.
The tools pre-dated the sharchive format ...

The problem some people are pointing out with the new shars is
that they are overly complex and make unarchiving on non-UNIX
machines more difficult than they need be.  A simple, exact,
format needs to be specified that is =compatible= with the tools
which already exist.  Then you can create interpreters for this
compatible format.  But don't create a completely incompatible
format expecting people to follow, because they won't ...

I am certain Warren Tucker and the other busybodies are well
intended in their efforts, however, sometimes less is more.  And
this just happens to be one of those times, in my humble opinion.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                             UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 832-8832                           Domain: jfh at rpp386.cactus.org