Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hafro!isgate!krafla!frisk
From: frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: xx vs. uu
Message-ID: <1513@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 13 Feb 90 10:59:08 GMT
Reply-To: frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason)
Organization: University of Iceland (RHI)
Lines: 39

The binaries that have appeared on c.b.i.p. have generally been UUencoded.
What I would like to propose now is a general switch to XXencode. 

The two methods are very similar, both translate two characters in the range
[0..255] into three printable characters in a 64 character set. The difference
is in the selection of the characters used. XXencode uses A-Z, a-z, 0-9,"+"
and "-", but UUencode uses most of the printable characters, other than a-z.

So - why use XXencode ?  UUencode is, after all, generally available and
there have not been any serious complaints in the past.

The reason is that in some cases there are problems with inter-network
gateways. Some of the BITNET/Internet gateways (for example one in Denmark)
perform a translation which is (to put it mildly) incorrect.

In some cases this results in the mapping of two characters into one, which
makes transmission of UUencoded binaries to/from BITNET sites in some
countries is almost impossible.

Of course the best solution would be to fix the problem, but attempts to
do so have been unsuccessful. It seems that the problem is that various
character sets on IBM mainframes use different positions for characters like
"[", "!" and "@".

The source for XXencode and XXdecode is available both in C and Basic. I
have compiled the C source without problems with Turbo C 2.0 and on
a HP/UX system.

One a side note - when c.b.i.p starts running again, which of the available
file-compression utilities do the readers of the group want to be used ?
ZOO and ZIP are obvious candidates, but there may be other possibilities.

Any suggestions ? 

Or maybe we should just leave the decision to the new moderator.

-- 
Fridrik Skulason   -   University of Iceland, Computing Services.
frisk@rhi.hi.is        Technical Editor, Virus Bulletin.