Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!gatech!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!ames!oliveb!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Poll on shar formats
Message-ID: <2201@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 4 Jun 88 18:15:32 GMT
References: <868@fig.bbn.com> <1494@microsoft.UUCP> <4838@teddy.UUCP> <887@fig.bbn.com>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 20

In article <887@fig.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
>An X on all lines seems to me playing lowest-common-denominator safety,
>in the same league as <64K postings.  Unfortunately it has a cost.

When used with compress, the cost of the X is essentially zero,
because the sequence "\nX" in the shar file has the same frequency
that "\n" would if you used cat.  By making the statistical frequency
of patterns in the file more erratic, you might actually INCREASE the
size of compressed shar files with your scheme.

I asked in the past that shar format not be used for patches so the
patch program would work directly from news.  I didn't get my way
on that one.  Then, in patch #10 to patch (just out), Larry Wall
fixed patch to be able to work with patches with an X at the
beginning of each line.  Now you want to break that too!  Let's
keep things as simple as possible.

-- 
- Joe Buck  {uunet,ucbvax,pyramid,<smart-site>}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck
jbuck@epimass.epi.com	Old Arpa mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net