Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!princeton!udel!mmdf From: Postmaster@locke.bitnet (PMDF Mail Server) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Undeliverable mail Message-ID: <871@louie.udel.EDU> Date: 20 Dec 87 12:15:44 GMT Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU Lines: 90 The message could not be delivered to: Addressee: MINIX Reason: %MAIL-E, no such user MINIX at node LOCKE ---------------------------------------- Received: from JNET-DAEMON by locke.hs.washington.edu; Sun, 20 Dec 87 04:12 PST Received: From NDSUVM1(MAILER) by UWALOCKE with RSCS id 1143 for MINIX@UWALOCKE; Sun, 20 Dec 87 04:09 PST Received: by NDSUVM1 (Mailer X1.24) id 0956; Sun, 20 Dec 87 06:02:27 CST Date: 19 Dec 87 05:16:19 GMT From: Glen Overby Subject: Re: awk/sed (looking for source) Sender: Minix operating system To: Local Redistribution Reply-to: INFO-MINIX@UDEL.edu Comments: To: info-minix@UDEL.EDU In article <1768@botter.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >In article <750@louie.udel.EDU> THELBEKK%NORUNIT.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu writes : >>Greetings! As far as I can see, the awk and sed sources still >>haven't made it into BITNET -- could a reposting be made? >> >Is this, in fact true? If so, I can repost. I can't recall if it has made it to MINIX-L on Bitnet, but I do know that it is on the archive server for Bitnet on the LISTSERV at NDSUVM1 (I maintain this). Other networks can access this mail, but it works best for people on BitNet due to the 80-column restriction on mail. > I would rather not uuencode >if I don't have to since that will increase the volume by tens of kilobytes. >What does BITNET actual do? If it just mungs tabs or something simple, I >can replace all the tabs with ! or ? or some other character that is not >otherwise used. BitNet has always been a problem. First of all, they run an IBM protocol which limits lines to 80 characters. To get around this, IBM has come up with TWO "packetising" techniques ("DISK DUMP and "NETDATA" to those unfortunate enough to know) which combine short lines and break up long ones. Unfortunately, mail does not use either of these techniques, so lines over 80 characters long either get truncated or wrapped (depending on what software you're using and how it is feeling today). I feel that the BitNet people should come up with some solution of their own to make themselves compatable with the rest of the world, rather than the rest of the world changing to accomodate the IBM world. There is no reason that all other networks should suffer the increased load of uuencoded sources or manually translated characters just because of brain dammage on BitNet. For a long time we at NDSU recieved all of our news over BitNet, and I worked around the problem of wrapped lines and expanded tabs (translation tables were no problem, fortunately). So what comes across BitNet *IS* useable; it just takes some work, and a few different techniques. Of the problems I ran into, the biggest was tab expansion. I worked around this problem with patches by using "patch" with the "loose" option (-l). Wrapped lines showed up on the filenames of the shar archives and on a few comments (a linefeed between * and / on a terminating comment). These are readily visible in sources that use 'sed' and start all lines with a 'X', but had to be manually fixed. Translation tables have not plagued me with Minix sources, but it still exists. The problem comes from the lack of a standard EBCDIC to ASCII translation, as well as internal inconsitiencies in EBCDIC. Curly braces ( { } ) are a classic one (There are two sets of them; one for IBM's "TN" print train and another for the "PN" train. IBM terminals NORMALLY use the "PN" ones, but many Unix systems use the "TN" one. And a major mail gateway to BitNet is a Unix machine). Tabs are an even worse situation. IBM's editors do not use tab characters, but instead display them as a strange character or something (depending on how you connect to your IBM). As a result, the gateways expand tabs. Most gateways will expand tabs on a FOUR character boundary rather than 8. So, in short, the problems with BitNet can be worked around by the people on that network so rest of us don't have to suffer for it. Or would you prefer to go back to using punched cards? >Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl) -- Glen Overby Bitnet: ncoverby@ndsuvax UUCP: uunet!ndsuvax!ncoverby