Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneff
From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: A readable, robust encoding for source postings
Keywords: shar, uudecode
Message-ID: <75110375@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Date: 1 Jan 91 00:24:20 GMT
References: <62-raymond-terry>
Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff)
Lines: 16

In article <62-raymond-terry> raymond!terry@galaxia.newport.ri.us (Terry Raymond) writes:
>The trouble is there is always a new version of shar being used which breaks
>the old unpackers, mine cannot unpack the latest distributions.  

Yes indeedy, because there is always someone out there to gild the lily.
Witness the latest pointless "TOUCH=cannot" oddity.

What would be nice would be for someone to concoct a Perl or C program
which accepts a signature prefix to look for (/^X/ for instance) and
writes files from raw shar's, regardless of format.

>I am suggesting that there be some serious discussion about using a packing
>format, with distributed code as is done with uudecode, to replace shar.

There are ASCII archives out there.  The problem is enforcing a
standard.