Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!munnari.oz.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!chook.ua.oz
From: cagney@chook.ua.oz (Andrew Cagney - aka Noid)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Source Posting Proposal, what about packaging...
Message-ID: <1281@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au>
Date: 4 Aug 90 07:48:26 GMT
References: <5389@plains.UUCP>
Sender: news@ucs.adelaide.edu.au
Lines: 27

Now that we've all recovered from 1.5.{0,3,5,8,9,10} And all those uuencoded
compressed shar archives is there any thing better?

Should we switch to tar or pax or what?
Can things be made more convenient?
Can things be made less convenient :-)

To me it would be nice to be able to take a posting and enter
   |magic-command
and have it unpack it exactly where you want it.
Magic-command could be something like:
   |modified-uud | tee posting.tar.Z | uncompress | ( cd / ; tar -xf - )
   Extracting /etc/passwd
   Extracting /etc/groups
:-)

Some thoughts...

	1. uuencoding is needed. And for more than just bitnet users
	2. Compress -b13 is probably a good idea
	3. during the 1.5 upgrade, shar was the cause of several of the
	   posting problems.
	4. How portable is tar?

Any comments?

						Andrew Cagney