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From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: binhex v. uuencode enclosures
Message-ID: <1990Oct8.165609.24787@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 8 Oct 90 16:56:09 GMT
References: <289@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <1990Oct6.074537.14443@d.cs.okstate.edu>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 49

In article <1990Oct6.074537.14443@d.cs.okstate.edu> minich@d.cs.okstate.edu (Robert Minich) writes:
>
>  Pardon my arrogance

Ok; you've always seemed like a nice guy otherwise.  :-)

>but why not support both uuencode AND binhex?

First: until a few weeks ago, I had no idea that there was a need for this
conversion.  It is hard to support file formats you didn't even know
existed, and even I have SOME lead time...

>I am not familiar with the method of enclosure,

There you hit on the second reason.  I'm not familiar, either, and I can't
decode files in unknown formats.  Uuencode I can figure out, but until John
Norstad said "AppleSingle", I had no idea how things were packed within
the file.  Both people who requested that Eudora handle this format
were unable to tell me anything beyond "uuencode".

There is only so far I will go to repair somebody else's mistakes.  Tracking
down file formats from my "competitors" is a bit too far, given the other
things I have to do, and the budget on which I have to do them.

Third: the BinHex intro line "\n(This file must be converted with BinHex...)" is awfully explicit.  Uuencode says: "\nbegin 644 name of file".
This is a royal pain in the rear end, since it's hardly inconceivable that
such a line might show up in the body of a message, and have *NOTHING* to do
with uuencode.  The more "guessing" in my program, the less happy I am;
guessing costs performance, space, and reliability.

>Just send it as uuencode and he can do
>something with it even if ??? is a Mac since his software supports both
>flavors. So really... how hard _is_ it to support the uuencoded enclosures?

And how hard is it for the other platform to decode BinHex?  If the other
platform is UNIX, the answer is, "not hard".  I dunno about the benighted
who use IBM-PC type thingies; maybe they have uudecode, but do they
know AppleSingle?  I suspect not.  Can they write code to handle it?
Probably, but then they could have ported UNIX xbin, too.  I don't buy this
one; if Eudora gets uuencode, it will be to communicate with Quickmail,
not MS-DOS.

Now that I know the magic word (AppleSingle), I will consider putting uuencode
support in Eudora, though it won't be my top priority.

(PS-Anybody know where AppleSingle is documented?  Email would do fine...)
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner