Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!cos!hadron!netxcom!ewiles
From: ewiles@netxcom.UUCP (Edwin Wiles)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: File headers on shar files
Message-ID: <564@netxcom.UUCP>
Date: 9 Dec 87 19:53:57 GMT
References: <393@ddsw1.UUCP> <10908@sri-spam.istc.sri.com>
Reply-To: ewiles@netxcom.UUCP (Edwin Wiles)
Lines: 30
Keywords: headers, comp.sources, source postings, shars

In article <10908@sri-spam.istc.sri.com> (Bill Wohler) writes:
>  also, if "tarmail" of the compress family had been made the de-facto
>  standard of shipping sources, then you wouldn't have to have even
>  written your script--atob would ignore all the leading garbage.  
>
>  for those not in the know, tarmail is a filter which essentially does:
>
>	tar | compress | btoa | mail
>
	I'm sorrry, but I pray to god that this does NOT become the standard.
	I prefer to be able to look the stuff over BEFORE I decide to use
	up my disk space on it.  Compress, or anything else which mucks the
	source into an unreadable form, is completely unacceptable.

>  compress makes the distributions smaller, which would make uucp sites
>  much happier (often cuts source by almost one half).

	Sorry to inform you, but compressed text, which is then recompressed
	usually ends up MUCH LARGER.  (I've checked.)  Thus you're better off
	not compressing it since news, etc. is usually traded between
	systems in a compressed format anyway.  (It is on our system.)
	And something that will *really* tick people off is if you start
	running up their communications costs.

>						wohler@istc.sri.com
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