Gidday,
I have been interested to see the reaction to my posting of
rebsearch. As someone else has pointed out there seems to be some confusion
about the code being binary or not. It was not binary, but source code
and was tarred, compressed and uuencoded. The uuencoding was necessary
because I believe compressed tar files contain non-ascii characters (I am
happy to be corrected). The code was not shar'red because I dont have shar -
I tried to but could not find it in the archives. I felt that posting it was
ok because it was small - smaller than some of the other concurrent postings
and there was no other obvious place to post it. I didn't realize the
bionet.software group was intended **only** for discussion. I realize
people are not trying to flame me in any way, but that the posting has
drawn attention to the absence of a molbio.sources group.
So on that question here are my 2 cents worth. I think a
molbio.software.sources or molbio.sources newsgroup would be useful. I agree
with the reservations expressed about binaries, but perhaps DOS or Mac users
might feel a molbio.software.binaries is useful. Certainly there are other
newsgroups that dsitribute software either as source code (comp.sources.unix)
or as binaries (is it comp.sources.amiga or one of the others?). These groups
also provide the postings in the form of archives accessible via anonymous
ftp from a variety of archive sites. If I understand the way it works correctly
the code goes first to the newsgroup and then at intervals it is archived.
Why could this mechanism not also be used for molbio software?
Cheers, Paul Fisher.
