Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: (shar(uuencode(arc)))
Message-ID: <10562@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 25 Apr 88 19:17:36 GMT
References: <446@csccat.UUCP> <379@yunccn.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 52

In article <379@yunccn.UUCP> shields@yunccn.UUCP (Paul Shields) writes:
| [...]
|     Well, what have we? 
| 	- uuencode/uudecode work fine on both Unix and MS-DOS.
  It is reliable, but inefficient. If you were paying the phones bills
would you rather see atob and btoa? They're public domain, fast, and
produce less (~ 8%) output and have checksums standard.
| 	- There's ZOO, and ARC-compatibles. 
  ARC fully compatibles, I hope you mean.
| 	- SHAR?  Well, ok, but that leaves DOS out in the cold unless you 
| 	  can provide an UN-SHAR for DOS that works (incidentally, the one 
| 	  I have wasn't capable of handling Keith Peterson's SHAR format.)
  This is a problem. As the author of that shar program, I can admit
that I intended it to be useful, easy, and automatic on UNIX systems.
Since this is a UNIX network that isn't a problem at maost sites. It is
desirable to provide a program able to unpack these on DOS, or to
provide an alternate format which uses something *all sites can run*.
| 	  Why not extend uuencode/uudecode instead?
  There is a very good extended uuencode available. It has a few minor
drawbacks:
  Must unpack very manually on UNIX.
  Written in Turbo Pascal, not easily ported to UNIX.

  The author has been kind enough to provide me with the source, but I'm
not sure that It is going to be easy to port to UNIX, and will require
tools in the reader's posession other than those which come with UNIX.
| -- 
| Paul Shields, 			Did you know:  We are the "They" all of those
| shields@yunccn.UUCP,		paranoid people worry about.
| or root@nccnat.UUCP		

  I certainly don't have all the answers, but I feel that there are some
general solutions. We should go with a compression method which works
on UNIX and DOS. We should go with software to break up the files which
will run in UNIX and DOS without concatenating files, editing, etc.

  Currently the best candidate for compressor is zoo, in my opinion, and
I might as well say it because the people who don't want to change will
accuse Rahul of pushing it because it's his baby. I don't see any
candidates for file separator and joiner, since my program doesn't run
in DOS and the decoder doesn't run in UNIX.

  If we want to have convenience we will have to pick something and
stick with it, forcing everyone to change. Otherwise we can keep on
using ARC and ZOO formats, and several flavors of uuencode, letting the
reader's decide how much effort they want to spend on getting the
programs.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me