Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!ira.uka.de!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!uunet!pipex!sunic!news.lth.se!news.lu.se!magnus
From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Subject: Policy for code postings (was: TADS Source for Continuous Substances)
Message-ID: <1993Apr23.100729.18501@nomina.lu.se>
Keywords: physics
Sender: news@nomina.lu.se (USENET News System)
Nntp-Posting-Host: dirac.thep.lu.se
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden
References: <C5vB0n.9z2@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 10:07:29 GMT
Lines: 48

In article <C5vB0n.9z2@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> greg@huia.canterbury.ac.nz (Greg Ewing) writes:
>This is the TADS source for a mini-adventure which includes a
>moderately general system for handling substances that come in 
>varying amounts.

First, I'd like to thank you for posting this; I haven't had the time
to look at it yet, but I'm sure I'll benefit from studying your code.

However, I'd like to act a little bit as a wet blanket by pointing out
that posting non-text  (in your case, a comrpessed and uuencoded file)
to a discussion newsgroup is considered bad netiquette, if nothing
else for the reason that not everybody has access to uudecode,
decompress and tar.

Maybe it's time to adopt a policy on the posting of code examples to
this newsgroup? 

My own views are these:

* It's perfectly OK to post example *source*  to this group, as long as it
  isn't too big. 

* Complete games should probably go to comp.sources.games instead,
  both so they can reach a bigger audience and because they tend to be
  rather big.

* Source code should be posted in the standard Usenet way, i.e. as a
  multi-part shar archive. Uuencoded compressed files are meaningless
  to many people (on non-Unix systems), but one can always unpack
  a shar file by hand.

* Executable files should *not* be posted here. There are special groups
  for the posting of binaries. If people start posting binaries here,
  some newsadmins may actually pull the plug on the entire newsgroup
  (because of the risk for the spreading of viruses, the perceived
  waste of bandwidth, and other reasons).


This proposed policy is very similar to what holds on other
newsgroups. 

So, what do you guys think?

              Magnus Olsson                | \e+      /_
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        University of Lund, Sweden         |   >----<           
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