mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (Don't have strength to leave) Meyer) (01/09/87)
It hasn't been to long ago that a similar thing was gone through on the net. Turns out there is a serious problem with pre-compressing then uuencoding things before posting them, as opposed to just uuencoding them. Namely, the backbone sites (you know, the people who pay the bills for getting all that neat software to you :-), and most anybody else with sense, runs news through compress before putting it on the phone lines to any other site. Even notes sites have this facility. The problem shows up when you consider that: (binary) -> "ARC" -> uuencode -> compress seems to produce noticably larger files than (binary) -> uuencode -> compress. (ARC is in quotes, as I don't recall the culprit last time; it was some micro-based file squisher, though). In terms of traffic, detection w/out correction is a loose. It makes it easier to find out that you've got a munged file, but you still wind up with requests for reposts. And it takes extra bandwidth to do the checking, for a net traffic increase. [Hmmm - maybe we could convince new to do the checking and re-request broken messages?] So the only real benefit to be gained from ARC is the archiving of multiple files. Aren't there non-compacting things to do this? For instance, tar (and I can provide a de-tar program for the Amiga; use it all the time)? Also, last time I looked, ARC didn't handle subdirectories, whereas tar does so quite nicely (very important for shipping mg around!). Of course, if ARC does handle directories, and the ARC -> uuencode -> compress path DOES NOT generate larger files than uuencode -> compress path, then this is all bilge. But someone should check. <mike
cherry@husc4.harvard.edu (michael cherry) (01/10/87)
Summary: Expires: Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: Keywords: If there was a tar program for the Amiga, not just the TarSplit program, you could: tar cf - !* | compress -b14 | btoa > savefile I find this method vary effective in allowing me to transfer multiple or single files between Unix<->Unix or Unix->VMS or Unix->Amiga. It would be useful to me to be able to add Amiga->VMS and Amiga<->Unix. The Amiga version of compress defaults to "-b14", btoa adds a checksum (but no correction) plus a header so it (like uuencode) can break the binary out of a mail file. I think I first saw this procedure described in net.sources as utilities called tarsend and untarsend that came with btoa.c and atob.c . Mike Cherry cherry%frodo.decnet@mghccc.harvard.edu