Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!oberon!skat.usc.edu!blarson From: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin,news.misc Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines Message-ID: <4756@oberon.USC.EDU> Date: Sun, 18-Oct-87 17:35:04 EDT Article-I.D.: oberon.4756 Posted: Sun Oct 18 17:35:04 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 19-Oct-87 01:38:45 EDT References: <7523@g.ms.uky.edu> <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <7526@g.ms.uky.edu> Sender: nobody@oberon.USC.EDU Reply-To: blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) Followup-To: news.misc Organization: USC AIS, Los Angeles Lines: 51 Xref: mnetor news.software.b:878 news.admin:1195 news.misc:1044 In article <7526@g.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) writes: >In article <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) writes: >>That's not reasonable. The reasonable approach is to do a trivial >>encapsulation or encoding that makes it possible to move USENET >>articles (no matter what their characteristics are) through BITNET, >>or any other strange network. >yes, I did exactly that for a long time with a news feed we had >BUT ... compress and atob/btoa don't run on the IBM 308x that's >out other neighbor on BITNET. Who said it had to be compress and btoa? >I agree that it's ridiculous that silly details of the transport >system, or other operating systems' storage methods, should >cause us to stunt the development of the software. >Some of us (you included) are trying to free this network from its' >reliance on Unix. Building the WorldNet and such like. But what will >the IBM people on BITNET think if they start seeing every article come >in with 2000 character long lines because someone on a Unix machine >wanted "automatic formatting" of his paragraphs? They'll only be able >to read the first 80 (132?) characters of each paragraph. So who's forcing them to truncate???? Why can't they set up some continuation line convention? A possible example would be to put a \ in column 80 to indicate that the next line is really part of the current line. The only programs that would have to know about such a convention already have to do ascii <-> ebcdic conversion, etc. (So it looks ugly to the news readers on the IBM system. If they care, they can fix their software.) While we're talking about fixing the news problems caused by bitnet, could they standardize an ascii <-> ebcdic conversion table for this use and make sure that tabs don't get converted to spaces? (The conversion breaks patch files, sendmail.cf files, etc.) >In essence you're looking down your noses at these people, and just >continuing the old tradition of saying "My is better than yours". No, we're saying if you are a single person who wants to talk to several thousand that already speak the same language, trying to insist that those thousands always use a subset of their language that you happen to speak so you don't have to bother to learn the rest of the language probably won't get you far. -- Bob Larson Arpa: Blarson@Ecla.Usc.Edu Uucp: {sdcrdcf,cit-vax}!oberon!skat!blarson blarson@skat.usc.edu Prime mailing list (requests): info-prime-request%fns1@ecla.usc.edu