Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!decwrl!nac.dec.com!plouff
From: plouff@nac.dec.com (Wes Plouff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Sources in text mode please
Message-ID: <8805171914.AA06927@decwrl.dec.com>
Date: 17 May 88 21:31:00 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 37

[Sorry, can only reply by mail to Usenet postings]

Matt Dillon (dillon@cory.berkeley.edu) complained
 
 >	This is why DNET is being distributed on sources as a uuencoded
 >	ZOO archive...  There is no other way to maintain the directory
 >	structure and I wasn't about to hand-generate the ARCs or split
 >	everything into a thousand singular-directory files and provide
 >	a script to restore it.

Hmm...  I get postings on a VAX running VMS.  So now I must dig out a 
VMS version of ZOO from somewhere in order to extract docs, look the 
files over, etc, without down- and up-loading to my Amiga.  It would 
also be nice to attempt a VMS port of DNET.  So let's look at the Unix 
end of the sources.  Oh, they're in TAR format?  VMS TAR?  Right, harder 
digging if I'm to make any use of this stuff at all.

As David Herron (david@ms.uky.edu) says, in a different context,
 
>Usenet is growing beyond its Unix starting points.  We have IBM mainframes
>which are full news partners/participants, nntp based news readers for 
>tops-20, vms, and symbolics lisp machines, and a number of other developments.

UUencoding versus plaintext is not a big issue to me, but please, PLEASE
don't introduce other encodings just because it is convenient, unless
the coding tools are widely available on non-Unix systems.  Rich Salz
does an excellent job on multi-directory postings to comp.sources.unix
using rather nice shell scripts (which our 'shar' can interpret).  With 
creative use of Amiga tools like 'arcre' it just can't be that hard to 
put together a reasonable package using only standard commands.

Aside to .sources. moderators: this is a small failing in your otherwise 
excellent handling of the moderated newsgroups.

-- 
Wes Plouff				plouff%nac.dec@decwrl.dec.com
Digital Equipment Corp, Littleton, Mass.	or ...!decwrl!nac!plouff