dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk (Denis Howe) (02/26/91)
In article <1841@tharr.UUCP> gtoal@tharr.UUCP (Graham Toal) writes:
if we don't have a comp.sources.acorn group, we'll never get any
postings out for the flame wars over what archiver to use.
I would guess that most people wanting to post binaries will go ahead
and use !Spark/Uuencode. I don't think the debate about archivers
will/should stopping people posting.
I agree with the arguments about not tying the group to a commercial
archiver and ability to unpack on Unix machines. I would therefore
propose that !Submit/!Extract should be used as much as possible for a
period and if it proves acceptable we should adopt it as our standard.
If we do have a comp.sources.acorn, we'll use shar like everyone
else in the comp.sources hierarchy as it should be.
I know of several versions of shar which use different Unix utilities
for unpacking (cat, wc, sed). These are all inter-operable on any
Unix, where all these utilites are pretty much guarenteed to work as
expected (this is the beauty of shar _for Unix_). For RiscOS there are
already three shar decoders on the Newcastle server but do they all
accept the same kind of shar files? Is there a Usenet (comp.sources)
standard shar format? I'm all for standardisation and Unix but we
might well be better off using the same archiver for sources and
binaries so people only need one RiscOS program to decode everything.
I also argue (a la FSF) strongly against binary-only/no-source postings
as being positively antisocial, for reasons which I've explained at
length and will say again by mail if you haven't suffered enough already :)
Mail me Graham, I'm a masochist (and buy me a C compiler)!!! :-)
--
Denis Howe C - C
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