david@ukma.UUCP (02/20/87)
I'm looking for the authors of the btoa/atob pair of programs which came with the compress v.4 distribution (The mod.sources distribution, not the 4.3BSD distribution), and not the first version of btoa/atob which was slightly different from the compress v.4 version. A group of us have been using compress and btoa/atob for news transmissions across BITNET and have discovered that there are some subtle bugs in the code. Sometimes under unknown conditions, btoa creates a file which atob cannot decode because it thinks there is a bad checksum involved. I'd found one bug in the program involving an ending condition which ... at the very end of the file under certain conditions the program (as posted) would make a blank line between the end of the data and the checksum trailer. This blank line (when passed through BITNET) became non-empty and the code in atob which passed over the blank line failed because it was no longer empty (i.e. it went from "\n" to " \n"). I've fixed that bug but there's another one in the program. I'd like to communicate with the author(s) and see what is known. The error rate is low enough that we get two to three failures per week's worth of news (er.. I have no idea how many batches we have go through per week, bit it might be as many as a thousand(?)). The header of the program mentions the person who'd been running the mail.compress list ... I've sent him a bug report on the one bug I found but that elicited no response. advTHANKSance. -- ----- David Herron, cbosgd!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET, david@ms.uky.csnet ----- (also "postmaster", "news", "netnews", "uucp", "mmdf", and ...) ----- (and the Usenet map maintainer for Kentucky.) ----- "A ... A carton of Camels by noon, or permanent penguin pate!"