Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dogie.macc.wisc.edu!uwvax!umn-d-ub!nic.MR.NET!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: An idea for safer and portable unshar-ing
Message-ID: <1989Oct3.235812.10363@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 3 Oct 89 23:58:12 GMT
References: <1989Sep30.171114.12550@chance.UUCP> <8910020054.AA08811@cscwam.UMD.EDU> <2270@munnari.oz.au>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.sources.d
Organization: North Coast Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 29

As quoted from <2270@munnari.oz.au> by ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe):
+---------------
| In article <8910020054.AA08811@cscwam.UMD.EDU>, djm@wam.UMD.EDU writes:
| > This suggestion seems to be moving in the direction of making archives
| > that plain old /bin/sh can't unpack at all.  Perhaps it's not a bad
| > idea.  An easier to parse, more standardized pure-ASCII archiving
| 
| On the other hand, if you're interested in "more standardised" stuff,
| don't forget that ASCII is (a) a *national* standard, not an international
| one, and (b) superceded by the ISO 8859 family, and (c) a pain for BITNET
| mail links.  Your new format should let an MS-DOS-using donor mail text
| containing e-acute and other such characters to a MAC-using recipient
| with no harm resulting from an intermediate passage through EBCDIC.  Get
| _that_ right first, and then worry about shar.
+---------------

This sounds a lot like Brad's ABE, which is already in the c.s.misc archives;
and I think it can be configured to produce archives with a small dearchiver
prepended.

Of course, your proposed PC-to-Mac transfer will still have the small problem
that Apple and IBM disagree on where to put e-acute....

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery@NCoast.ORG
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