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From: jim@anacom1.UUCP (Jim Bacon)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Message-ID: <373@anacom1.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jul 90 17:15:18 GMT
References: <15652@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <3114@psueea.UUCP> <1990Jul10.203015.27282@eci386.uucp> <5256@plains.UUCP>
Reply-To: jim@anacom1.UUCP (Jim Bacon, CPD Manager)
Organization: Anacom CPD, Anaheim, CA
Lines: 47

In article <5256@plains.UUCP> overby@plains.UUCP (Glen Overby) writes:
>In article <15652@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) charges:
>>We have recently seen a spate of "source" postings in "uuencoded
>>compressed TAR" form, instead of SHAR or other traditional plain text
>>formats.
>
[stuff deleted]
>
>to which <3114@psueea.UUCP> kirkenda@eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) confesses:
>> I'm certainly guilty of posting articles in *.tar.Z.uue format.  I'm not
>> entirely happy with it, but I believe there are some valid reasons for
>> using this ugly format...
>
[stuff deleted]
>
>I offer one sugestion: for groups which are source-only, have the gateway
>program pump everything thru 'compress | uuencode' before feeding it to
>Listserv.  I still see no solution for discussion groups which also get
>sources posted to them.
>
>While I'm indicting comp.os.minix, I'd like to also charge comp.binaries.*
>with a similar offense, using arc, zip or zoo instead of compress.
>
>Other Solutions, anyone?

I have been involved with the with FIDOnet on MSDOS for a good number of
years and have suffered the impact of changing "stanadards" for
compression methods.

At the start, ARC was the standard.  Then PKARC came along.  That wasn't
much of a problem, but did cause some confusion.  Then the lawsuits
started flying and we were buried under a slew of new programs, ZIP,
ZOO, and a half dozen others.

Now, I never know what to expect thru the network and about half of my
mail gets lost because I have taken the position that ARC is the
standard on my machine.

I would strongly urge that only a single compression utility be used as
a standard, and for UN*X I would suggest compress.


-- 
Jim Bacon                            | "A computer's attention span is only
Anacom General Corp., CA             |  as long as its extension cord."
jim@anacom1.cpd.com                  |
zardoz!anacom1!jim                   |                                 Anon