Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Leila Burrell-Davis
leilabd at syma.sussex.ac.uk
Tue Jul 17 02:25:14 AEST 1990
In article <3124 at psueea.UUCP> kirkenda at eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) writes:
>Here's an idea: Lets compromise! Come up with a format that really works!
>
>We should be able to come up with a protocol that combines the safety of
>uuencoding with the readability of shar archives.
No one has yet mentioned Brad Templeton's abe, which was designed to
solve these problems, but has never achieved widespread usage.
I enclose the read.me from the package:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ABE Ascii-Binary Encoding System by B. Templeton
ABE is a replacement for uuencode/uudecode designed to deal with all
the typical problems of USENET transmission, along with those of other
media.
Advantages are:
Files are often smaller, and compress well.
All printable characters map to themselves, so strings in
binaries are readable right in the encoding.
All lines are indexed, so sort(1) can repair any random
scrambling of lines or files. (This can be turned off.)
Extraneous lines (news headers, comments, signatures etc.) are
ignored, even in the middle of encodings.
A PD tiny decoder is available to include with files for first
time users.
Files can be split up automatically into equal sized blocks.
Blocks can contain redundant information so that the decoder
can handle blocks in any order, even with reposted duplicates
and extraneous articles.
Files with blank regions can be constructed from multi-part encodings
with damaged blocks.
Multiple files can be placed in one encoding.
The decoder is extremely general and configurable, and supports many
features not currently found in the encoder, but which other encoder
writers might fight useful.
In general, a redundant ABE encoding posted to a typical newsgroup over a
certain article region can be decoded with something as simple as:
dabe /usr/spool/news/comp/binaries/group/3[45]?
Where it doesn't matter much if there are postings in a random order,
duplicate postings, or inserted articles on other topics. Ie. exactly
all the things that are a pain about usenet (or mail) binaries.
(You can usually run dabe right on your entire mailbox.)
The ABE encoder (and decoder) support 3 different encoding formats. One
uses all 94 printable ASCII characters, the other avoids characters that
have trouble in ASCII-EBCDIC translations, and the 3rd is the UUENCODE
format. (ABE can make files decodable by a typical uudecode program.)
-----------------
--
Leila Burrell-Davis, Computing Service, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Tel: +44 273 678390 Fax: +44 273 678470
Email: leilabd at syma.sussex.ac.uk (JANET: leilabd at uk.ac.sussex.syma)
More information about the Alt.sources.d
mailing list