Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: wishlist: current line number variable
Message-ID: <15706@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Date: 27 Jul 90 06:58:31 GMT
References: <8854@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <15698@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <8873@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Lines: 59

In article <8873@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
 ...
>There's not really a shar standard yet, and as soon
>as there is one, someone will find a valid reason to break it.  And lots
>of invalid ones, but the point is that they will break it, continually.
>Or are self-unpacking formats only good enough for Unix machines?

I see this point, but I worry about (a) the necessity of dragging in
a third party utility in order for a new standard shar to work, versus
(b) Perl-dom striking out in its own incompatible direction rather than
applying energies to try and actually GET a new standard in place.  Neither
is really acceptable.

What this discussion makes me realize, though, is that it would be nice
for a new shar standard to ALLOW bundled self extraction.  We should
remember that.

Is there anyone working on this, seriously?  I would be happy to contribute.

>: And of the subset that do have Perl, what fraction will have the NEWEST
>: VERSION necessary to support the extractor?  None now; some presently;
>: more eventually; all nearly never.  The ones with old Perls will try and
>: fail to extract, and we'll get problem reports.
>
>Almost everyone will feel necessary to get the version documented in the
>book, I expect.  It's not like they have to buy an upgrade license...
>And most of what they need is there already, should they feel the need
>to emulate -x and __END__ with a script of their own.

What I mean to get at, but fumbled, was: the alien environments where
people have moved mountains to port Perl successfully, are also the
slowest to assimilate new versions.  How long will it take for
patchlevel 19 of MS-DOS or Atari or RTU Perl to trickle out to the ends
of the earth?  Yet those are the people who would supposedly benefit from
having a portable unshar that doesn't need Bourne and Unix tools.

>#!/usr/bin/perl
>close STDOUT;
>while (<STDIN>) { 
>    s/^X// && (print(), next);
>    s/echo "(.*)"/warn "$1\n"/;
>    s/^sed[^>]*(>.*)/open(STDOUT,\$1)/;
>    s/^SHAR_EOF$/close STDOUT/;
>    s/chmod (\d+) (\S+)/chmod("0$1", \$2)/;
>    eval;
>}
>__END__
>#!/bin/sh
>...

Probably want to add

    s/^mkdir (.*)/mkdir("$1",0755)/;

in there...

-- 
To have a horror of the bourgeois   (\(    Tom Neff
is bourgeois. -- Jules Renard        )\)   tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM