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From: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm,net.news.sa,net.sources.d
Subject: Re: Beware of Blindly Un-SHARing a File
Message-ID: <2511@teddy.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-Apr-86 12:59:57 EST
Article-I.D.: teddy.2511
Posted: Thu Apr 17 12:59:57 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Apr-86 21:02:32 EST
References: <947@kitty.UUCP> <2407@prls.UUCP> <1439@garfield.columbia.edu> <2555@utcsri.UUCP>
Reply-To: jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 37
Keywords: ``Relink'' April Fool
Xref: watmath net.news.adm:601 net.news.sa:270 net.sources.d:118

In article <2555@utcsri.UUCP> greg@utcsri.UUCP (Gregory Smith) writes:
>Instead of using 'shar' to pack stuff, and 'sh' to unpack them, why not
>just have *two* programs, one to pack and one to upack? ( maybe 'mar'
>for 'mail-archive', and unmar).

I would support this, except for the problems it would cause.  Does anyone
remember how often the request for "How do I unrotate jokes" use to be
posted on net.jokes until the unrotate program was built into news?  This
would be more of the same, but worse.

This net is made up of a largely transient population - Universities and
Fast moving high-tech companies.  Unless the "unshar" program is posted
periodically, or is actually built into a widely-distributed version of
news, each posting will result in a large number of new users who will not be
able to extract the files from the archive.

This is "Shar"'s one strength - no special program besides the "Universally
Available" Borne shell is required (besides some commonly available UNIX
tools).  Of course, a special program is required to PACK a "shar" archive -
but this is much less of a problem - a person distributing software tends to
a bit more sophisticated than the average person USING a distributed package.

A reasonable substitute for shar would be the Berkeley "Portable AR" format,
which unfortunately has not been adopted by AT&T (at least not by System V,
maybe V.2?).  It is a simple enough format that a program can be written to
extract files for those without a "portable" AR  (in fact, I vaguely remember
someone DID do this several years ago - I'll have to root around in my old
net.sources tapes).  It does not provide any directory heirarchy capability,
nor does it allow for automatic uuencode/uudecode of binary files, which
a good shar replacement should be able to do.

As long as we ARE using shar format, the first rule MUST be:  Don't unshar
anything as ROOT!!!!

John P. Nelson, Moderator, mod.sources
(decvax!genrad!panda!jpn  seismo!harvard!wjh12!panda!jpn)
Send source code to panda!sources, requests to panda!sources-request