Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!usc!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!cunyvm!ndsuvm1.bitnet!nu013809 From: NU013809@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Greg Wettstein) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: Automated extraction of programs from c.b.i.p postings. Message-ID: <4399NU013809@NDSUVM1> Date: 27 Jul 90 12:59:54 GMT References: <2077@cirrusl.UUCP> Organization: North Dakota Higher Education Computer Network, Fargo, ND Lines: 76 DISCLAIMER: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article. I watched with interest when Brad posted the ABE and DABE sources to c.b.i.p. to see what would happen. I am sure that if Brad had his druthers he would probably want to try and do the whole thing again. I think it was a mistake to post the sources in a format which differed from the standard currently being used. I think the users and especially the moderator deserve the consideration of using the agreed upon standard. Even though Brad may have erred in his posting technique I think we as a group are in err if we do not give his new encoding techniques serious consideration. UUencode and UUdecode are indeed standards and are in widespread use, they also appear to be a consistent source of problems for people trying to decode binary postings. They function very well when used properly but in my opinion they were not designed for the type of application environment we find ourselves in. Brad gave some very careful consideration to the problems that the net faces when he designed his en{de}coding utilities. ABE and DABE are designed from the ground up to deal with multi-part postings, header and trailer information and the perennial difficulty of ASCII to EBCDIC conversion. The addition of these functionalities alone should provide sufficient merit for giving his utilities consideration. Beyond this ABE and DABE provide error checking, splitting of large postings, universal naming and optimization of the encoding technique to generate the smallest encoded files. These are all enhancements which should make life easier for people who have to deal with encoded postings. I grabbed the sources from the net and had them up and running under both MS-DOS and UNIX with very few problems. After experimenting with them I began testing them on a few selected users within our own mail/communication domain. Both my beta users and myself have experienced few problems with the utilities and I personally find it difficult to go back to uuen{de}code formats. I have no connection or affiliation with Brad. I have never spoken with him, never received a piece of mail from him and wouldn't know him if we walked by me on the street. I also believe that he made a mistake when he first introduced his utilities to the USENET community. This notwithstanding I also believe that his utilities have the ability to make a significant contribution to the way we conduct business in this group. I have watched, with interest, this newgroup for a long time. I have seen it move from being close to extinction due to lack of control and organization to a clean, well run group which is moving an awful lot of productive volume to its users. This group has strived for portability by using zoo as its compression format, has developed tools such as brik to aids its members and strives through repeated postings of starter kits to educate its new users and to keep old users current. We now have an opportunity to consider another advancement. I believe that anyone who looks very carefully at the functionality of ABE and DABE will acknowledge that it possesses some significant advantages over our previous uuen{de}code technology. Many of us who belong to this group are trained with a technical/scientific background. The individual who trained me always stressed the importance of being introspective with regard to technology and to always being asking the question, 'Am I using using the best, most efficient methodology currently available?'. If, as a group, we ask ourselves that question it will be a moot point whether or not we re-examine Brad's utilities. I am sure that this will generate some discussion. We are settling into our new operation but I do not have news running within the Center's domain. If anyone would like to follow up via e-mail please use the address in my signature. It will save me from having to climb on the mainframe to handle my mail. I read the group every morning so I will catch anything that gets posted as discussion. Thanks and I will be interested to see what happens. As always, Dr. G.W. Wettstein Roger Maris Cancer Center Computing Facility UUCP: uunet!plains!wind!greg INTERNET: greg%wind.uucp@plains.nodak.edu Phone: 701-234-2833 `The truest mark of a man's wisdom is his ability to listen to other men expound their wisdom.'