Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!houxz!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!zehntel!dual!amd!decwrl!decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!bet From: bet@ecsvax.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Posting uuencoded binaries to net.sources Message-ID: <3081@ecsvax.UUCP> Date: Wed, 8-Aug-84 23:40:27 EDT Article-I.D.: ecsvax.3081 Posted: Wed Aug 8 23:40:27 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 12-Aug-84 01:32:01 EDT Lines: 24 I think I am the one who started off this "despicable practice". I hadn't thought that anyone would object, and confess to surprise. In fact, as you said, binaries are better than nothing at all, and as far as I know binaries were all there were for these things. HOWEVER, uuencode is TRASHED by netnews!!! It works fine for mail and uucp, but somebody in some news software trims trailing blanks, which clobbers the file. I have been meaning to write a quick little shell script to append a printing character to each line, and another to remove these, so that news won't corrupt the files, but if uuencoded posting are offensive flame-drawers I won't bother. So what's the verdict? Personally, I think net.sources is appropriate. It isn't a rule that I know of that anything posted there must be portable source; these things are useful to a sufficient body of users to make individual mailings expensive; uuencode recently came over the net so everybody can be expected to have it. All that is needed beyond uudecode is a binary download facility to snarf the stuff to the target micro, and most installations have umodem or some such equivalent. I'm for continuing this approach AS SOON AS I get the news-bug kludge script written. Bennett Todd ...{decvax,ihnp4,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!bet