Xref: utzoo news.groups:28207 comp.sys.acorn:620 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!tgould!dbh From: dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk (Denis Howe) Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.sys.acorn Subject: Archiver for comp.binaries.acorn, comp.sources.acorn Message-ID: Date: 26 Feb 91 12:32:25 GMT References: <1991Feb20.090010.4539@ste.dyn.bae.co.uk> <1991Feb21.135542.13533@cbnewse.att.com> <1841@tharr.UUCP> Sender: news@doc.ic.ac.uk Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK Lines: 37 In-reply-to: gtoal@tharr.UUCP's message of 23 Feb 91 01:38:32 GMT In article <1841@tharr.UUCP> gtoal@tharr.UUCP (Graham Toal) writes: if we don't have a comp.sources.acorn group, we'll never get any postings out for the flame wars over what archiver to use. I would guess that most people wanting to post binaries will go ahead and use !Spark/Uuencode. I don't think the debate about archivers will/should stopping people posting. I agree with the arguments about not tying the group to a commercial archiver and ability to unpack on Unix machines. I would therefore propose that !Submit/!Extract should be used as much as possible for a period and if it proves acceptable we should adopt it as our standard. If we do have a comp.sources.acorn, we'll use shar like everyone else in the comp.sources hierarchy as it should be. I know of several versions of shar which use different Unix utilities for unpacking (cat, wc, sed). These are all inter-operable on any Unix, where all these utilites are pretty much guarenteed to work as expected (this is the beauty of shar _for Unix_). For RiscOS there are already three shar decoders on the Newcastle server but do they all accept the same kind of shar files? Is there a Usenet (comp.sources) standard shar format? I'm all for standardisation and Unix but we might well be better off using the same archiver for sources and binaries so people only need one RiscOS program to decode everything. I also argue (a la FSF) strongly against binary-only/no-source postings as being positively antisocial, for reasons which I've explained at length and will say again by mail if you haven't suffered enough already :) Mail me Graham, I'm a masochist (and buy me a C compiler)!!! :-) -- Denis Howe C - C / \ +44 (71) 589 5111 x5064 C - C - C \ / DiazaBicycloHeptene N = N