Christopher Smith wrote:
SJS wrote:
begin quoting David Brown as of Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 11:01:23PM -0800:
On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 08:46:52PM -0800, Christopher Smith wrote:
Sigh... forgot to attach the code. How embarassing.
It still didn't make it through. The message was broken into two parts,
almost making it look like the mailing list removed the attachment or
something.
That's expected behavior.
It's code. It works as text. Just include it in the body.
A line of dashes works well as a separator.
You mean like what happens automatically when you use MIME attachments? ;-)
In fairness, this is not the only list I use that has this feature, and
sometimes it is warranted, but this is a group where people explicitly
are supposed to share code. While you can encode snippets just fine
inline (arguably for small bits of code it is even more convenient), it
is kind of a mess to do that when multiple files are involved.
Sure, I could just copy and past from multiple files in to a single
message, put in dashes to separate files, and somehow encode file names
and any relevant permissions and such at the beginning of each file.
Then anyone who wanted to actually work with the code would then
essentially do the reverse of what I'd done to reconstitute the
structure of the work.
....or we could use standardized formats for doing such things. Then a
computer could automate the work in a fast and error free fashion. Your
mail client would understand the structure and perhaps choose not to
download the code at all. The only real downside of this is that some
old mail clients, all of which run on non-Linux platforms, have security
flaws in them that can be exploited through attachments without the
person reading the mail having a chance to avoid downloading the attachment.
What are the real odds here that someone reading this list is running
one of these old, unpatched clients with no anti-virus (or really old
anti-virus I guess) protecting them?
If we really think there is a risk, could we perhaps compromise by
having the kplug mailserver filter stuff through ClamAV instead of
throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Given the plethora of options available for posting files for download,
there is no need to support attachments to the mailing list. The
decision to ban attachments was made a long time ago by the Steering
Committee (of which I am a member) and still stands. We do not need to
revisit this argument.
Gus
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