Re: Why BinSCII?

[ag471@yfn.ysu.edu (Eric S. Ford)]

In a previous article, mnementh@netcom.com (David R. Villegas) says:

>Someone posted an executable but uuencode crossed my mind as an alternative
>which leads me to the following questions:
>
>Since most of the binaries posts are Shrinkit archives, is there an advantage
>to using binscii rather than uuencode?  Considering that a good number of
>people (if not most of them) who access USENET do so via a UNIX or VMS
>system, I'd wager that uuencode/uudecode would be more readily available
>than bsc/sciibin.  Besides, compiling the latter could be a problem for
>people who aren't familiar with compiling or for people with small disk
>quotas.

A growing number of us are accessing USENET through a freenet connection and
are limited (in some cases VERY limited) as to what utilities are open to
us.  Binscii works for everyone so I'd vote to use it whenever practical.  I
get annoyed everytime I encounter a .tar or .aaf archive.  Fortunately, the
latter is easier to work around.  Since Binscii is usually posted on the
ftp sites in several formats (executable, binary and Executioner) it isn't
that difficcult to get a working copy up and running.


-- 
Eric S. Ford    ag471@yfn.ysu.edu
		ac569@dayton.wright.edu
		E.Ford6@genie.geis.com