Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!david
From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Sources in text mode please
Message-ID: <9246@g.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 12 May 88 17:21:37 GMT
References: <8805110255.AA21249@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <52841@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 39

In article <52841@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes:
 ...
>I agree with this, except that I still assert that source code should be
>source code and not "zooed" or "arced" when distributed. It should always
>be shar'd and somethings like .info files will have to be uuencoded.

Requiring the source to be un-coded (i.e. in clear) assumes that
news articles pass through the system unmunged.  But they often
don't.  Weeell..  "often" is relative at least to this site.  We
have a news neighbor that's an IBM mainframe, and news which passes
through there undergoes a number of interesting transformatsions.  

Further ... The news article format is purposely compatible with
mail message format so that news feeds could be made via mail if
necessary.  Mail doesn't gaurantee unmunged delivery.

Source files are particularly sensitive to slight mungings.  A common
munging is tab interpretation (conversion to spacing, and sometimes
in differing styles).  Later patches fail mysteriously because the
patch has tabs and the source has spaces (or the other way around).
Or you've got a shell script which has a grep pattern which includes
a hard tab, and the tab gets translated to a bunch of spaces and doesn't
work again.

If the source is uuencoded (especially if done with the newer versions
of uuencode that do checksums) it will survive better in it's way
through the networks.

Usenet is growing beyond it's Unix starting points.  We have IBM mainframes
which are full news partners/participants, nntp based news readers for 
tops-20, vms, and symbolics lisp machines, and a number of other developments.
We can't continue to assume that the situations will continue as
they have been in the past.  As we interconnect with other types of
systems, each new "foriegn" system brings its own problems along.
-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy            
<---- or:                {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET                                  
<---- Windowing... The Amiga has windowing. The Mac has windowing (echoes of
<---- Jonathan Livingston Seagull: "Just flying? A mosquito can do that much!").