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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