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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: minix - is this a sensible thought ?
Message-ID: <7619@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Feb-87 16:39:45 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.7619
Posted: Tue Feb  3 16:39:45 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Feb-87 16:39:45 EST
References: <962@osiris.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 24
Keywords: file transfer formats, etc, etc.

> ...different formats in which binaries and sources are posted. What I
> would like to suggest, since we are starting out afresh here, is that
> we establish a MINIX source/binary posting standard...

Fine idea.  I would like to suggest that the first element of the posting
standard should be "thou shalt post thy sources, not thy binaries".  Bear
in mind that MINIX is already being ported to at least one major machine
that is *not* binary compatible with the 8088.

> We do, however, have tar(1) and shar. What if we all agree that 
> postings of MINIX material be in of tar format. ...
> ...it beats the alternative of sending everything in shar format, which
> takes more bytes than is needed.

Come again?  Don't you realize that tar takes the file, pads it out to a
512-byte boundary, and then prepends a 512-byte header block?  Shar takes
significantly *fewer* bytes than tar, and it avoids all the encode/decode
nonsense needed to transmit non-text files over a text-oriented news system.
Something that did data compression might be nice, but after uuencoding the
result to make it text again, the benefits are modest and the hassles of
uncrating the stuff are considerable.
-- 
Legalize			Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
freedom!			{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry