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From: LEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: Re: FILE (VMS utility to modify file attributes)
Message-ID: <8607021151.AA16816@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 2-Jul-86 07:52:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8607021151.AA16816
Posted: Wed Jul  2 07:52:16 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Jul-86 22:44:54 EDT
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Reply-To: <LEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA>
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    Don't send programs in the mail to a mailing list!!! It is bad enough
    half the people on this list don't bother reading the documentation
    but to send programs that I would not be caught trying to compile
    is totally anti-social and a massive hemmorage of many disk drives
    and communication channels.

    Make the programs available by requests or thru BITSERVER or a
    anonymous tcp/ip ftp access or by posting to USENET mod.sources.

    I can't wait for sites to start charging for mail. 

    -Rudy
I disagree; I find nothing objectionable in the posting of programs as a
general practice, or in the particular programs in question.

There is nothing "anti-social" about the FILE program; the worst you can do
is screw up one of your own files, and perhaps your own process.  (Yes, I
know there is a VMS 4.3 bug - fixed in 4.4 - that FILE could trigger, causing
a crash.  The "anti-social" message was the recent one pointing out the
details of this bug.)

My own feelings on program postings are:

	- Post only programs of general utility.  It can be hard to determine
		"general utility" in some cases, but often there's little
		doubt.  Certainly, any program that is a response to a request
		to "anyone who has a program to do...", is likely to be of
		general interest.
	- Post only reasonably short programs (say, up to 30 blocks or so);
	- Don't post anything until you are pretty sure it's fully debugged.
		The last thing we need is a posting followed by 100 bug fixes.
	- DON'T post system crashers.

The volume of program posting to this list has been fairly small, well below
the point where I, for one, would see it as a problem.  To the contrary, I've
picked up some really useful stuff this way.  If it DOES become a problem, we
can deal with it then.

Obviously, there are differences of opinion on this issue.  Comments?

							-- Jerry
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