REPOST lharc102A Part 01/04 BSD Unix to Amiga archives

[Kent Paul Dolan]

There really is something in here appropriate to both newsgroups; persevere.

xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

| Some person with an axe to grind about uuencoded source archives chose to
| do a little net.vandalism rather than engage in dialog.  Since the control
| message was inserted directly at uunet.uu.net, it is probably impossible to
| trace this childish behavior back to its originator.

ralph at laas.fr (Ralph P. Sobek) writes:

> Well, why not create alt.binaries or alt.uuencoded for such parts?

Perfectly simple: alt.sources is for _sources_; that says something about
contents, not about format.  Over the years, and with experience, most folks
learn how to handle nearly any _format_; the only things I can't unpack that
I know of by now are Mac BINHEX and IBM-PC PKZIP files, and only because
neither contain anything of interest to an Amiga user.  The advantage of
alt.sources is that, whatever the format in which the data is transmitted,
I know that "under all that manure is a pony"; I'm going to find sources
when I find a way to unpack it.  This would not be true for either of your
suggestions.

The insistance by some folks on clear text transmission of sources seems
mostly to be an unwillingness to learn how to deal with available tools,
whatever the stated motives may be.

> For split uuencoded files I suggest that net user use UUE to create,
> and I suggest net users to get UUD. After that one doesn't care
> anymore if the file is split or not. UUE adds headers around each
> split part, and UUD will concatenate the files all by itself.

Sounds good; can they do this without the headers and such being stripped
first, like unshar does for shars?

One of the whole file checksum routines would be a nice standard feature
of future uuencode mechanisms, too.

> Ralph P. Sobek Disclaimer: The above ruminations are my own.

> THINK: Due to IMF & World Bank policies 100 million Latin American
> children are living, eating, and sleeping in the streets -- Le Monde
> Diplomatique

Yes, a little thinking shows how bogus that viewpoint is.

I'd rather put the blame a little closer to the source of the problem:
citizens who breed without regard for the lack of resources to support
larger populations, and governments and religious authorities that
encourage overbreeding by restricting easy access to birth control
technology.

Famine and lack of shelter are sad but inevitable triage mechanisms on
those whole populations that concentrate on reproduction to the
exclusion of sense, planning, agriculture, or economic infrastructure.

Blaming the world banking mechanism for refusing to carry and extend bad
debts for nations that will take no steps to attack the overpopulation
roots of their problems, or even stop directly contributing to their
problems by bad public policy, is a bit on the disingenuous side, but
there are always those who would rather see a conspiracy than suffer the
necessary pain of admitting and correcting their own stupidity.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian at Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian at well.sf.ca.us>