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From: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Dangerous hole in Usenet!
Keywords: "it's a secret ... but they told me!" -- david dobkin
Message-ID: <624@pcrat.UUCP>
Date: 27 Nov 88 14:31:57 GMT
References: <1227@vsi1.UUCP> <117@hudson.Morgan.COM> <800@mailrus.cc.umich.edu> <151@ecicrl.UUCP> <2301@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Organization: PC Research, Inc., Tinton Falls, NJ
Lines: 26

In article <2301@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>The referenced article suggested switching from shar to some more portable
>format.
>
>Might I suggest the Software Tools Group's text archive format? It's designed

IF a new format is being proposed as a standard, please
make sure that it can easily handle the odd bits of binary
stuff that are needed by many programs.  Just handling
the text is not enough.  I'm not talking about executables,
I'm talking about, say, icon bitmaps and the like.  I want
to say:
	portarc *
And have the files packed up, even if some are binary.
And I don't want to have to say which ones are binary!

Also, the format should allow browsing at least the first
few files without having to unpack it.  (Without this
requirement, we might as well be shipping around compressed
and uuencoded "tar", "cpio -c", or "afio" archives).

-- 
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