Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!gatech!udel!mmdf
From: KYY%NIHCUDEC.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (M. DOBSON)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Problems with minix stuff from BITNET
Message-ID: <4951@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 19 Oct 88 20:22:09 GMT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 25

In a previous message I mentioned a minor problem I am having upgrading to
1.3.  That is nothing compared to the major problems BITNET is causing for
me.  It seems virtually everything but uuencoded stuff is munged in ways
ranging from annoying to disasterous.  The problems begin right with the
shell archives.  BITNET just doesn't seem to be able to handle the control
characters that are in the sed/gres command strings, somehow a ctrl-E is
being inserted.  If unchanged, when this archive is fed to sh, all the leading
X's are left on the lines :-(  The only way I've been able to handle this
is to pass the files through edlin under DOS and to a global replace of
the ctrl-EX string with X.  Mined won't read the files because they contain
non-ascii characters.  Once I've unshar'd them, I still have problems because
all the tabs are converted to spaces.  This causes the character counts to
be wrong so I never know if the files have been damaged in other ways.

This conversion of tabs to spaces also causes even the latest verion of
patch to fail regularly  when more than one tab on the origianl line is
involved.  It seems patch just can't deal with that large of a white
space difference forcing me to hand apply many of the cdifs.  This white
space problem also means I will never be able to tell if my patched files
match ast's since the sizes and crcs are all going to be off.

Any suggestions for dealing with this (other than getting on uesnet :-))
would be appreciated.

        Mike Dobson (kyy@nihcudec.BITNET)