begin quoting Christopher Smith as of Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 09:47:23AM -0800: > SJS wrote: [snip] > > 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? ;-)
Heh. MIME does a lot more than a line of dashes. > 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. That's what URLs are for. > Sure, I could just copy and past from multiple files in to a single :!r filename (Or equivalent for your editor...) > message, put in dashes to separate files, and somehow encode file names > and any relevant permissions and such at the beginning of each file. Permissions aren't generally needed, unless you're playing games with them; at that point, you're probably better off with "ls -l" in the appropriate directory. > 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. Yup. Plus, if someone wanted to comment on aspects of your layout and design, it's right there, ready to be quoted. (I was tempted to run the code thru 'nl' first, to aid in discussion.) > ....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. Or if it's really that complicated, you can provide a URL, and leave the mailing list for discussion, and leave bulk file transfer out of the discussion list. What are the real odds here that someone reading this list is lacking access to a web-server on which to put code archives? > 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? At least one of us is using hotmail. > If we really think there is a risk, could we perhaps compromise by > having the kplug mailserver filter stuff through ClamAV instead of I am unimpressed with ClamAV thus far. Can't see *relying* on it for much of anything. > throwing out the baby with the bath water? Perhaps not trying to bathe the baby in the soup would be a better start. -- And they all sat around the pot, peering at the baby soup Muttering under their breath: "It's just murky goop!" Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
