Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp From: tp@mccall.com Newsgroups: alt.sources.d Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes Message-ID: <3091.2699ffb1@mccall.com> Date: 10 Jul 90 16:17:52 GMT References: <15652@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <3114@psueea.UUCP> <11553@letni.UUCP> Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA Lines: 51 In article , sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes: > doug@letni.UUCP (Doug Davis) writes: > > Compressing an article reduces phone time. If compress finds a file > is bigger after compression, it doesn't compress it. So the phone > costs really aren't increased by users doing their own compression. If the user doing compression defeats the compression that would otherwise be done, than it prevents compress from reducing the costs, which means the same thing as increasing them. The question to be answered is whether a compressed uuencoded compressed tar file is smaller or larger than a compressed shar file, even given that compress will not increase the size (the extra compress on these being the one done by news when it wants to send it). I'll leave that little exercise to someone who can do it more easily. > Plus, Lempel-Ziv is not the ultimate compressor for certain kinds > of data. There's ways of compressing bitmaps, for instance, that > are a lot more effective. I believe most of the previous posters on this did say that compressing and uuencoding a binary (bitmaps certainly qualify) was a valid thing to do. Just compress and encode the files that need it, though, and shar it up with the source code. > I don't see what the problem is. Compress is smart enough to not > expand files, and it *does* save disk space on the remote site, so > why complain? My biggest gripe is that I can't read the stuff to see if I want it. Tom may post an explanation, but not all posted explanations are useful. The anonymous contact software has a whole posting describing how to unpack it and how to build it, with NO information as to what the h*ll it is. Also, does anyone really think that posting it this way saved anyone any diskspace, since extra tools were posted to unpack it? Even good explanations aren't good enough. The rest of you probably don't care, but I run VMS, and I need to glance at the code to see if it is useful to me. Some ports are trivial, some are very difficult. At least the stuff on the ACS software mentioned that it is in perl, which doesn't run on VMS (at the moment), so I was saved the inordinate hassle of unpacking that one to find out what it was. Many people will ignore your posting if they can't unpack it with the tools immediately at hand, and do so easily. I wonder how many people saw all the uumerge stuff and the encoded file and just skipped it as being not worth the trouble to read a bunch of stuff just to figure out how to unpack it. -- Terry Poot The McCall Pattern Company (uucp: ...!rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp) 615 McCall Road (800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041 Manhattan, KS 66502, USA