Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!tektronix!percival!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: Source ARCs are inappropriate!
Message-ID: <1119@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 25 Oct 88 21:18:03 GMT
Article-I.D.: bucket.1119
References: <7119@dasys1.UUCP>
Reply-To: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Organization: Rick's Home Grown Unix; Portland, OR
Lines: 33

In article <7119@dasys1.UUCP> tneff@dasys1.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
<The appropriate thing to do with a source collection is to package it
<as a shell archive and post it to a source newsgroup as clear text.
<ARC+UUENCODE should be restricted to no-choice binaries like .EXE's and
<data files.  Newsbatch-compress will do a better job of saving net
<bandwidth on your source files than ARC+UUENCODE can anyway. Text
<should still have primacy on Netnews whenever technically possible, so
<that the greatest number of newsreaders can enjoy the benefits of the
<information they're paying to pass around.

Last time I looked there was not a comp.sources.ibm.pc group. Comp.sources.*
has far to little of use to non-Unix systems to follow.

No as to the matter of packing the files as a "shell archive"...
*DON'T*!! I have tried several versions of programs that would supposedly
unpack shell archives on my MS-DOS system only to have them fail one or
another of the shell archives I've downloaded. This means I have to unpack
them on the unix system and then download a whole bunch of files. And since
they aren't packed, they take a lot of time to download. I could use compress
on them as I have a working 16-bit compress on my MS-DOS system, but then I
have to go and change all the newlines to cr/lf's. The file xfer program can
do that automatically on text files. 

I'd much rather download the article and do all the editing, uudecoding
and unarcing on *my* machine, where I don't have to worry about hogging
a limited resource like phone lines. 


-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'.
You know... I'd rather be a hacker."