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From: gnu@hoptoad.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: minix - is this a sensible thought ?
Message-ID: <1717@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Tue, 3-Feb-87 04:50:12 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1717
Posted: Tue Feb  3 04:50:12 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Feb-87 03:56:47 EST
References: <962@osiris.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 38
Keywords: file transfer formats, etc, etc.

In article <962@osiris.UUCP>, mjranum@osiris.UUCP (Marcus Ranum) writes:
>                                       What if we all agree that 
> postings of MINIX material be in of tar format. This would entail,
> I realize, making net postings of uuencoded tar archives, uudecoding
> them, downloading them, and then dosread(MINIX)ing them before finally
> untar(1)ing them. This is a pain in the tuchus for sure, but I feel
> it beats the alternative of sending everything in shar format, which
> takes more bytes than is needed. The slowest part (I anticipate) is
> the downloading part to the Mush-Dos floppy...

No!  I wrote the PD tar and I assure you that tar format wastes more
bytes than a well done "shar".  Tar puts a 512-byte header on the front
of each file, and 1024 bytes of zeros on the end of the whole archive.
At worst "shar" puts a few hundred bytes around each file, and at best
(cat >file <<'EOF file') about 20 bytes.

Shar also has the advantage that it is text, so it doesn't need uuencoding
(increases the space required).  This also means that people can *read* it.
I consider this the most significant advantage, actually.  Just think --
a communication medium *directly readable by humans*.  What won't they
think of next...

Also remember that many people working with Minix will not be on IBM
Feces "downloading to the Mush-Dos floppy".  Within a few months I
expect that somebody will be running uucp and netnews on Minix systems;
and within a year Minix will run on systems that have some hair on
their chests and faster I/O than floppies and 1200 baud.

Remember, anything that can run on a PDP-11 can probably run in the
Minix 64kI+64kD address space, modulo licensing restrictions.
Since netnews runs on 11's, it can be ported to Minix.  Note that all the
netnews software is public domain already (even though recent versions
have an invalid copyright notice by Rick Adams: the software was written
by many people and contributed by them to the public domain).
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   gnu@ingres.berkeley.edu
Love your country but never trust its government.
		     -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania