Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!mtunx!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz
From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Poll on shar formats
Message-ID: <889@fig.bbn.com>
Date: 5 Jun 88 15:14:16 GMT
Article-I.D.: fig.889
Organization: BBN Laboratories Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 28

For what my opinion is worth, based on the stuff I've read here and gotten
through the mail, I think there are only two ways to handle leading X's
(or whatever) on shar scripts:
	either Always do it
	or Never do it
Protecting only "dangerous" characters:
	Makes it harder for humans to follow
	Makes it hard to do "grep -v '^X'" to find trojan horses
	Fails to take advantage of the new feature in patch 
	Makes it harder on some hand unpackers
	Gains no space for those who do compressed batches
	Fails to note that not everyone knows what the pessimistic
	    set of "dangerous" characters are.
(Sorry about some of those sentences; I was going for parallel structure.)

From my experience as the moderator of a newsgroup (perennially
second-most-popular, sigh :-) that is gatewayed into a mailing list
received by a couple of hundred sites, the "Never do it" philosophy is
naive.

I haven't yet gotten to the point where I'll repackage anything that does
not come in an "Always do it" shar, but I'm getting there.  If only I had
the time...

Thanks, folks, for all the comments and feedback.
	/rich $alz
-- 
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.