ietf-822
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Re: UUencode

1991-05-01 15:44:43
Would it not be reasonable to make a recommendation in 
the RFC strongly recommending the use of a version of uuencode/uudecode 
after
a certain revision number?

Probably not.  The receiving mail agent should have a reasonable chance
of coping with uuencoded stuff, so we want to define what senders who
use it should put in their headers, and what receivers who want to
understand it should do, but we shouldn't encourage the use of it by
senders.  Rather, we should encourage people to use BASE64.

I guess I did not word this as clearly as I should have.  I am not suggesting
that the RFC encourage uuencode (or any other encoding scheme), but rather
suggeting that if uuencode is chosen as an encoding mechanism, then the use
of revisions past rev level x would be much less prone to the error conditions
already mentioned in this list.  In other words, if someone chooses to use
uuencode, let's give some recommendations as to what versions to use (or not
to use) so as to avoid many of the problems already cited.

Regards,

Tim Kehres

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