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From: pes@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: RE: uudecode
Message-ID: <683@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 22-Dec-86 05:34:42 EST
Article-I.D.: bath63.683
Posted: Mon Dec 22 05:34:42 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Dec-86 18:37:59 EST
References: <861218032713.598038@RADC-MULTICS.ARPA>
Reply-To: pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: AUCC c/o University of Bath
Lines: 35


Still looking at this one.  Given my impression of the range of people having
the problems, I doubt it's human error.  Means there's a bug in one of:

   uudecode
   binary kermit
   binary kermit

(where  means some specific combination of OS+hardware, or some small
set of such -- since most people don't see it.  I suspect it's some particular
verson of U**x or (less likely) of V*X/VMS -- maybe even the popular
Berkely 4.2bsd on one particular hardware setup.)

I've now got one tiny, and incomplete, bit of evidence, but it's a start.
I e-mailed a copy of Uniterm to a lady at Sussex.  She uudecoded it on her
big machine, and binary transferred the result to the ST.  It didn't run.
I posted her a disk copy of my UUDECODE.  She transferred the encoded file
to her ST, UUDECODEd there, and it ran.

A comparison of the 2 ARC files (one good, one bad) resulted in 1350
differences, apparently (by eye scan) all of one bit.  There was no obvious
pattern either as to which bit in a byte, or as to 'spacing' of the bytes.
They all appeared (quick scan, agan) to be in the same 'direction' -- that
is, the bad file had a bit on which should have been off (or vice versa,
my data's hiding on an inaccessible machine right now, but for sure all the
same direction).

So, someone's got a bug.  If anyone else finds a similar looking problem,
it would help, I think, if they could re-UUENCODE the 'bad' file, and
do a char diffs between the received UUENCODEd and the regenerated
UUENCODEd, to see if some particular char or sequence is implicated.  It
would be nice to track this down.  (It offends me even if I can't duplicate it
on my machine that such a bug should be allowed to live...)

Cheers, Paul