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From: werner@utastro.UUCP (Werner Uhrig)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,news.admin
Subject: some (should-be) ground-rules for submissions to comp.binaries.*
Summary: motivated by GuardDog causing xbin to dump core
Message-ID: <2689@utastro.UUCP>
Date: 22 May 88 00:21:22 GMT
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 48


	[ this article was crossposted to news.admin because I feel that the ]
	[ basic premise applies to non-Macintosh groups also ]
Folks,
	I, usually, pipe hexed articles through xbin to take advantage of the
reduced download-time of the resulting unhexed file(s).  

I was rather bothered that xbin (on my favorite SUN) choked on GuardDog,
enough so, that I decided to figure out why.  I downloaded the hex-sources
and unhexed them with BinHex4, resulting in a file called "Guard Dog TM"
(where TM represents the sign for Trademark).  Suspecting that the non-ASCII
character may be the cause of xbin choking, I changed the name to "Guard Dog"
(given that 'Guard Dog' is of type SYSTEM you have to 'bend some bits'
before you can rename the file), hexed and uploaded that file, and, presto,
xbin stopped dumping core.

While at it, I figured I might as well check how much smaller compressed file 
would have been (I used StuffIt-1.40 for that), with the following
result:

  32 -rw-r--r--  1 werner   other       32134 May 21 17:36 Guard_Dog.Hqx
  18 -rw-r--r--  1 werner   other       18336 May 21 17:55 Guard_Dog.sit.hqx

All this leads me to the following suggestion:

ALL files distributed on COMP.BINARIES.MAC and COMP.SOURCES.MAC should be
COMPRESSED before being HEXED.  The (intermediate) compressed file should
have a name consisting of ASCII-characters only so that xbin can be used to
unhexify the article on the mainframe in order to reduce the download time.

It would be best if the person submitting the article would do "the work",
however, the moderator should, at least, verify that the submitted article
conform to the standard  (I assume that he already verifies that no pirated
material gets distributed, by inspecting the submitted material).

If the moderator is unable (or unwilling) for technical or personal reasons
to take on that (additional?) work, I propose that a call go out for
volunteers to help with such tasks - or for a new moderator who is able and
willing to take on or coordinate such an effort.

		Cheers,		---Werner

	"Let's take the best there is and improve it"
		--- someone famous is bound to have come to that conclusion
			before me ....

PS: if someone has a version of xbin that can handle ALL non-ASCII chars in
	file-names, I'd appreciate .....