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From: gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Message-ID: <1990Jul13.063905.23672@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 13 Jul 90 06:39:05 GMT
References: <1990Jul10.203015.27282@eci386.uucp> <5256@plains.UUCP> <3124@psueea.UUCP>
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Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
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In article <3124@psueea.UUCP> kirkenda@eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) writes:

>Here's an idea: Lets compromise!  Come up with a format that really works!

Ok, let's set a goal: the files should unpack totally unchanged.

>3) Archives should begin with a table of all printable ASCII characters,
>   so we can tell when transliteration has gone awry.

This is good, although if two characters are mapped into one, the
process has failed. Formats like btoa avoid this because not many
computers map several English alphabetic characters into one. 

>5) Tabs should be expanded to spaces.  The extraction program should convert
>   groups of spaces back into tabs.

How can you do this and preserve the original file? What if the
original file has a bunch of spaces in a row?

>6) The program that creates the archive should give a warning message when
>   a file's whitespace is likely to be reformated.  For example, spaces at
>   the end of a line are a no-no.

They may be a no-no, but what if you're transmitting context diffs on
files which used to have excess spaces... you could presumably think
up other situations in which you'd want trailing spaces to be
preserved.

>9) Should we use trigraphs for some of the more troublesome ASCII characters?
>   The extraction utility could convert them back into real characters.

You'd definately need some way of signaling special characters. Then
you could mark tabs and fake ends-of-lines in order to prevent spaces
from getting eaten. But then we'd have to figure out every single
special character that is at risk for being munged -- {} [] $ |\

By the time you get done, it might be rather hard to read.

--
"Perhaps I'm commenting a bit cynically, but I think I'm qualified to."
                                              - Dan Bernstein