harper at nic.funet.fi (Rob Harper) writes:
> [ stuff deleted ]
>> Biologists have made their own "standards" and they are *NOT* in accord
> with what is usually used on the net... but once we have taught people
> to do things a certain way then it is a tremendously difficult task to
> persuded them to do it some other way. ( A change from the NETSERV UUE/UUD
> to the Richard Marks UUE/UUD would screw things up for many because of the
> file nameing conventions employed... a change to UXX encoding would be
> even more confusing, not to mention the fact that merely whispering
> SHAR/UNSHAR causes many noses to sniff the air and exclaim what is this??)
>I can't believe I'm reading what I'm reading !!! The author *can't* be Rob
Harper {checks header of article again} - yes it is. Wake me up, I'm having
a bad dream!!
Seriously, the "NETSERV" UUE/UUD's don't depart from the standard - all my
DOS and UN*X versions of uudecode (from GNU, Toad Hall, Richard Marks, etc.)
work perfectly well on NETSERV uue'ed files. All the EMBL version does is use
the alternate character set that does not contain the ' ' (space) character.
All modern versions of uuencode use this convention.
I can't understand the objection to shar - public domain shar/unshar's are
available for UN*X, DOS and VMS and Mac systems, and the arguments for distri-
buting source code as shar archives have been made many times. Since they
get compressed by news software, they don't take up much more bandwidth on
the Net than say, uuencoded ZOO archives, and they can be read at *all* sites.
How much savvy does it take to type "unshar <filename>" ?? The PD unshar
versions I have (DOS and UNIX) automatically strip off extraneous material.
>> Let me know what you want, and how you want it.
Well, for starters, let's try to educate people by *adhering* to international
standards of communication, not breaking them. After all, standards are
intended to make things accessible to everyone !!
> RGDS -=ROB=-
> --
> Rob Harper / E-mail: harper at convex.csc.fi> Finnish State Computer Centre / Molbio/software: harper at nic.funet.fi> P.O. Box 40, SF-02101 Espoo / Telephone: +358 0 457 2076
> Finland / Fax: +358 0 457 2302
Thanks Rob, for all your efforts.
--
Everyone repeat to yourselves: This is not a flame, this is not a flame.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: David O. Tinker
Dept. of Biochemistry, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ont. Canada, M5S 1A8
and
Blue Nile Software EMAIL: dtinker at blunile.guild.org
16 Victoria St. {uunet|utzoo}!utdoe!torag!blunile!dtinker
Markham, Ont. L6C 1A7 VOICE: (416) 887-5631
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
