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From: dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: ARChiving of binary postings
Message-ID: <90@sdeggo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Sep-87 15:06:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdeggo.90
Posted: Tue Sep 15 15:06:34 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Sep-87 06:45:43 EDT
References: <138@dalcsug.UUCP>
Organization: Lazy Programmer's Society of San Diego
Lines: 23
Keywords: arc,compress

In article <138@dalcsug.UUCP>, dalegass@dalcsug.UUCP (Dale Gass) writes:
> I have recently been informed that posting ARChived binaries and sources
> actually takes more transmission time in the net than if the un-compressed
> files were posted.  This is supposedly due to the fact that unix 'compress'es
> these postings before they go out, and an .ARC file actually *grows* when
> compressed.
Nope.  Compress will expand (marginally) an ARC'd archive, since you can only
compress something so much, but once it is uuencoded, it can be compressed
again, since uuencoding introduces some redundancy.  Furthermore, not all sites
run compressed news and for some sites (like mine) where disk space is at a
premium having four or five 100K uuencoded binary files would make life quite
miserable.
> If this turns out to be true, it certainly would make more sense for everyone
> to post 'shar'ed archives, which are not compressed at all.  

You can't shar binaries.  Just don't work.


-- 
David L. Smith
{sdcsvax!sdamos,ihnp4!jack!man, hp-sdd!crash}!sdeggo!dave
sdeggo!dave@sdamos.ucsd.edu 
"How can you tell when our network president is lying?  His lips move."