Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!tank!mimsy!eneevax!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: IEEE 1003.2 (was Re: fixing rm * (was: Worm/Passwords))
Message-ID: <9212@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 16 Dec 88 21:53:06 GMT
References: <1812@ndsuvax.UUCP> <717@quintus.UUCP> <6518@csli.STANFORD.EDU> <6550@csli.STANFORD.EDU> <145@minya.UUCP> <9137@smoke.BRL.MIL> <33251@think.UUCP> <9154@smoke.BRL.MIL> <396@aber-cs.UUCP> <5203@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <5203@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>There is no existing portable text archive format.

You seem to be thinking of mailer problems.  That's not what
I had in mind when discussing portable archive formats.

Discussion of whether or not a file format is portable should
start by assuming that it is bit-for-bit transferred without
corruption of information it contains to the target system.
Then you should consider whether a reasonable program that
interprets the archive's contents would work without change
and without system-specific tailoring on both systems.