Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs,news.misc Subject: Re: sending source code Message-ID: <1442@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: Sat, 7-Nov-87 15:14:46 EST Article-I.D.: bsu-cs.1442 Posted: Sat Nov 7 15:14:46 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 10-Nov-87 02:22:40 EST References: <631@louie.udel.EDU> <332@uvicctr.UUCP> <2566@umn-cs.UUCP> <467@srs.UUCP> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 31 Xref: mnetor comp.sources.bugs:430 news.misc:1110 In article <467@srs.UUCP> dan@srs.UUCP (Dan Kegel) paraphrases somebody: It is desirable to use a compressing archiver (like zoo or arc) to package groups of files for transmission. However, the resulting archives must be uuencoded (or btoa'd) before transmission on Usenet. Why not just make the compressing archiver output in a format suitable for direct transmission on Usenet? In August 1986, when I wrote the first version of zoo, one of the options I considered was to allow printable output similar to uuencoding. But at that time I did not have access to Usenet, and the utility of doing so did not seem too great. Things changed later, but the design of the archive format was a bit stabilized. However, I decided to make printable output a viable option and figured out how to do it so the archiver would automatically recognize it and treat it like any other archive. Thus, if this is ever implemented (say around 1990??), you will be able to take a printable zoo archive that is part of an article and feed it to zoo and it will recognize the beginning of the archive in the article and extract it. To this end, the current version (zoo 1.71) does all file I/O through an extra layer of I/O functions, allowing any special I/O translations (potentially ASCII/EBCDIC, CR/LF translation, or uu{en,de}coding) to be done in the low-level routines without changing the rest of the program at all. (Also called "object-oriented I/O".) Whether I will ever have time to implement this is another question--the list of things to do is long enough already. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi