[net.micro.atari16] New Archive Format, Uniterm/ARC blues

csc@watmath.UUCP (Computer Sci Club) (10/19/86)

It's all very nice that Uniterm is so wonderful, and that Arc is easy to
use, but I haven't been able to get any Uniterm working yet.  The latest
release arrived here with Part 2 (UNITERM.A) truncated.  I ran arc anyway,
and it told me that a header was bad, and then it got a bus error.  Not
terribly impressive.  I had hoped it could get one file out.

Could someone please repost or send me a copy of Uniterm Part 2?

Does arc really calculate a CRC on the members in the archive?  I was planning
to write a network transfer archive program (with no compression) which would:

	- encode into a very (very!) restricted character set
	- be much more efficient than uuencode for ascii text
	- be as efficient for arbitrary 8 bit wide data
	- perform proper CRC checking
	- automagically split the archive into chunks for posting
	- automagically assemble chunks from raw mail and news
	- be fairly immune to added control characters (CR, LF, etc)
	- be able to extract undamaged files from a damaged archive

This program could be used for transmitting anything.  It would even be
useful for text, as it would offer assurance of correctness, and would
be cheap as transmitting text raw.

Any point it this?  I already have the encoding part written for another
project and the CRC stuff I stole, so it's not a huge amount of work.
Arc's biggest problem is that you have to uuencode it, and uuencode is not
robust (read: sucks the big one).  If you think I should do this, let me
know, and I will.  It won't be a large program.

Tracy Tims
mail to ihnp4!watmath!unit36!tracy