Xref: utzoo alt.sources.d:660 comp.sources.d:5604
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcrware!jejones
From: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Message-ID: <2148@mcrware.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jul 90 16:30:36 GMT
References: <15652@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <3114@psueea.UUCP> <1990Jul10.203015.27282@eci386.uucp> <5256@plains.UUCP> <3124@psueea.UUCP>
Reply-To: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Organization: Microware Systems Corp., Des Moines, Iowa
Lines: 18

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!
>
>We should be able to come up with a protocol that combines the safety of
>uuencoding with the readability of shar archives.  Some features I would
>like to see in the ultimate USENET archive format are:
[list of constraints edited out]

Actually, Eric Tilenius, former moderator of the BITNET CoCo mailing list,
came up with a fairly reasonable way of encoding files so that they could
survive the ASCII-EBCDIC meatgrinder.  It doesn't bother letters, digits,
and spaces, so that (1) shar files fed through it are still pretty readable
and (2) compression on the output would still pay off.  This format, which
goes by the name CUTS (dunno what that's an acronym for), might be a usable
one.  If there's interest (express it via email, please!), I will go digging
for the description.

	James Jones