Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!ast From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Important new program: cleanit.c Message-ID: <3540@ast.cs.vu.nl> Date: 6 Oct 89 11:35:29 GMT References: <3492@ast.cs.vu.nl> Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam Lines: 22 In article broman@nosc.mil writes: >uudecode already ignores things before "begin" and after "end", I didn't realize that. In any case, the cut line mechanism is more general than only uudecode files. It is quite common to see messages posted with some sort of cut line (also nonencoded ones), so if we could standardize the format of the cut line, we could make the files suitable for computer processing. 60 characters has got to be enough to allow everyone to express their personal thoughts on cut lines. >It's too bad that floppy-only systems seem to be excluded from any of this >action, because the big compressed archive probably won't fit on a floppy. I think that will be increasingly the case. The /usr/bin + /usr/lib directories are already approaching 2 megabytes together, which means that a floppy based system can only run a small fraction of the binaries, let alone having the increasingingly large documentation directory, man files etc. online. Not to mention sources. While I will continue to make boot diskettes etc to actually come up on floppies, I think that the number of floppy-only users is rapidly decreasing, as hard disks keep coming down in price. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)