A readable, robust encoding for source postings

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

In article <6540 at uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> rhys at batserver.cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>In <1990Dec30.170302.21665 at druid.uucp> darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>>I posted my genfiles program which I hoped would be a jumpimg off point for
>>such an effort.  Has anyone looked at it and have suggestions to enhance
>>the protocols I suggested?
>
>I missed the original discussion, so I may be repeating things, but
>the central problem I think there will be in getting a new transmission
>standard off the ground is actually making it a standard :-).  unshar,
True.

>uuencode and the like are very widespread, and trying to shake their
>ground may be very hard.  Maybe in the interim a cut-down "encoder"
>is needed that can be wrapped-up in a shar archive, and will be unpacked,
>compiled and run to unpack the rest.  e.g. the shar archive could look
This is still not universal.  It only works on Unix like systems.  A
standard should operate under any OS.  That is why my system was made simple
so that unpackers can be easily written for any platform.  Also note that
using shell to unpack can be a security hole.

[stuff deleted]

>
>P.S. D'Arcy, could you tell us where your program may be found, since
>     I missed it first time around.
I posted to alt.sources so check with the local archive sites.  I was going
to post to comp.sources.misc once I got some feedback and fixed up any
problems people had with it but so far there have been very few suggestions
for fixing it up.  Naturally this means that the code is perfect and bug-free
and no fixes are necessary.  :-)  Actually I have been adding support for
multiple input files which was not present in the first version.  As the
shar is only 13634 bytes (13415 for a genfiles script) I could probably
post another interim version but I don't want to clutter up everyone's
archives unnecessarily so I will probably wait till I have done a few
more fixes and tested it.  In particular the program to unpack is almost
done but the program to create the scripts, while working, can use some
more enhancements.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy at druid)     |
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