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From: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,alt.flame
Subject: Re: Death to binaries (was re: pictures in binaries)
Keywords: Like wow, man.
Message-ID: <25945@bbn.COM>
Date: 18 Jun 88 20:51:09 GMT
References: <4476@gryphon.CTS.COM> <2132@sugar.UUCP> <4523@gryphon.CTS.COM> <2145@sugar.UUCP>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 32

Well, for my part, I rather appreciate having the working binaries
available.  I don't have a C compiler, and I'm not interested in
getting one, not to mention that if .binaries goes away I'd probably
have to get TWO (or are Manx and Lattice really compatible now?), not
to mention paying for and keeping up with the bugfixes and upgrades.
Not to mention the time it would take to compile things before I could
hack with them.  And further, unless you guys are a LOT more compulsive
than any programmer I've ever met, the stuff about trojan horses is all
just horsehockeys: do you REALLY pore over the C sources of every
program that rolls in before you'll compile and run it to make sure
that there's no obfuscated C hiding something nasty?  That's _real_
dedication, and, I suspect, pretty unusual even for the more ardent "I
won't run a binary I didn't compile" crowd.

On the other hand... I can see that there are surely a fair number of
Amiga hackers who have no use for the binaries, and sites that can
legitimately object to paying for passing all the uuencoded bits
through.  I wonder if, for the binary-likers, just having the binaries
*available* would be adequate.  Actually, maybe doing the sources that
way would be good enough, too.  That is, Instead of posting ANYTHING,
you just post a suitable announcement of the availability of
whatever-it-is, and folks can go retrieve it on their own.  What I was
thinking was if, perhaps, someone (peter?  Pat?) could run the
archive-server software (I assume it must be reasonably portable and
standard, since it is running at a couple of places around the
internet), and then if you saw a particular suite of sources or
binaries that interested you, you could just email tothe server and get
what you wanted back by email.
   __
  /  )                              Bernie Cosell
 /--<  _  __  __   o _              BBN Labs, Cambridge, MA 02238
/___/_(<_/ (_/) )_(_(<_             cosell@bbn.com