Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:13242 comp.binaries.ibm.pc:582
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pacbell!att-ih!chinet!saj
From: saj@chinet.UUCP (Stephen Jacobs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.binaries.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Standard format for ARCed files
Message-ID: <3647@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 15 Mar 88 23:03:28 GMT
References: <5439@swan.ulowell.edu> <1551@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 9
Summary: keep sizes of non-readable files under control


As long as we're considering standards for postings, I'd like to suggest
that anything which doesn't uudecode to human-readable text should be kept to
some modest size.  In particular, a single arc or zoo or .Z file containing
several 50K+ executables and maybe a digitized image or two is not the most
desirable output from uudecode.  The reason for this suggestion is that the
error checking in uudecode is imperfect, and it is easy, especially when
concatinating input to it, to get errors.  Localization and containment of 
errors is easier by hand in text files; errors in large compressed collections
of non-text are difficult to deal with