Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!ok From: ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: An idea for safer and portable unshar-ing Message-ID: <2270@munnari.oz.au> Date: 2 Oct 89 10:12:09 GMT References: <1989Sep30.171114.12550@chance.UUCP> <8910020054.AA08811@cscwam.UMD.EDU> Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au Lines: 33 In article <8910020054.AA08811@cscwam.UMD.EDU>, djm@wam.UMD.EDU writes: > This suggestion seems to be moving in the direction of making archives > that plain old /bin/sh can't unpack at all. Perhaps it's not a bad > idea. An easier to parse, more standardized pure-ASCII archiving > format than a shell archive would certainly be more appropriate for > Amiga, MS-DOS, VMS, etc. postings, and would allow the packing and > unpacking programs more versatility, security and control on Unix > systems as well. Let's not forget why we use sharchives in the first place. The point was to have a format for distributing sources which could be used by people who HAVEN'T got any specialised "unshar". If I am away from the net for a couple of months and find when I get back that all the sources are in some new format that I can't process, I am not going to be very happy. And saying that something is held on an archive somewhere is not very helpful either; lots of people have no FTP access. It would be ok to go over to a new format IF each of the source groups that used it posted a fresh copy of the decoding program every month, along with the index for the previous month. MS-DOS people can get a shell for a small sum. VMS people can get DEC/Shell; and if they haven't got it, you should remember that a posting in C is useless to many VMS sites anyway. On the other hand, if you're interested in "more standardised" stuff, don't forget that ASCII is (a) a *national* standard, not an international one, and (b) superceded by the ISO 8859 family, and (c) a pain for BITNET mail links. Your new format should let an MS-DOS-using donor mail text containing e-acute and other such characters to a MAC-using recipient with no harm resulting from an intermediate passage through EBCDIC. Get _that_ right first, and then worry about shar.