Xref: utzoo alt.sources.d:1237 comp.sources.d:6209 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: alt.sources.d,comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Read this if you're having trouble unpacking Tcl Message-ID: <1990Dec27.071632.7272@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 27 Dec 90 07:16:32 GMT References: <7372@sugar.hackercorp.com> <88817429@bfmny0.BFM.COM> Distribution: alt Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 44 tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes: > karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: >>Enclosed is the help file for anyone who is having trouble unpacking Tcl. >If people would just post source to the source newsgroups, instead of >this unreadable binary crap, no help file would be necessary. Well, "unreadable" is a bit much, Karl was very helpful in email helping me find the tools to unpack tcl. The packaging was justified I think by the more than 50% savings in the size of the compressed, uuencoded file over the uncompressed original; tcl unpacks into nearly 1200 1K blocks of files. Lots of software doesn't transit the news system well in source form, even in shars; the extra long lines promoted by both C and awk programming styles, embedded control characters in the clear text version, and transit between EBCDIC and ASCII hosts can all cause unencoded files to be damaged by software problems in the news software (and one must be careful in the choice of uuencodes to survive the third danger intact). As the net becomes wider and the gateways more diverse, naked or shar-ed source has less and less chance of arriving intact, so probably more and more source files will transit the net in compressed encoded form as time goes on. No sense getting abusive about that. I don't think complaining about the packaging is fair if the product arrives intact because of it, but Karl's choice of cpio over tar was unfortunate. At any rate, as he indicated in his posting, the comp.sources.unix archive pax, in volume 17, does indeed allow compilation of a cpio (clone?) that successfully unpacks tcl; I just finished doing just that. Remember, almost nowhere on the net do the *.sources.* files arrive without having been compressed somewhere along the way; seeing them delivered to you in a compressed format merely defers the final unpacking to you, at some cost in convenience but benefit in size and robustness of transport. No one was going to eyeball that whole 1.2Mbytes plus packaging before deciding whether to save it off and unpack it in any case, and Karl did provide an introduction of sorts to the software's purpose. Kent, the man from xanth.