gnu@sun.uucp (12/25/84)
We've seen a variety of schemes for passing source and object files around on the Usenet and thru network mail. I think that an easy hack in netnews would make it all much simpler. Provide a standard file enclosure/encoding/decoding inside netnews itself. To send source files, simply put a header line saying "Enclosures: foo.c foo.1". When posted, inews would pick up these files and attach them to the message. When the message is read, readnews and friends would show the body of the message, but not the files -- just their names in the Enclosures: line. A simple command would extract the enclosures into a specified (or defaulted) directory. This would also help the people who archive source, since they could identify the source files in each message, index the filenames, etc. The encoded form could be a stylized shell archive (parseable without using the shell, but if you feed it to the shell, it works). It should deal with any file including binaries; this would simplify the info-mac peoples' lives, sending fonts, etc. We have enough working shar programs and scripts, surely we can automate a working one and make all our lives easier.
lepreau@utah-cs.UUCP (Jay Lepreau) (12/27/84)
If this were implemented in a way which avoided using the shell, it would be a big win for one reason: security. With all the crud posted to net.sources lately, I am just waiting for the latest and greatest J Random Hack shar archive containing commands such as cd; rm -rf * .[a-z]* in it, or much trickier. Eyeballing and grepping shar archives for such things doesn't work, particularly if here documents are (carefully) left unquoted, or the cat/sed commands vary. Actually, I suppose a shell script or program would be easy to write-- anything with unquoted here documents would be unsafe, and the rest could be scanned and just the shell commands output for vgrepping. Further ideas welcome. Jay Lepreau