Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 2-May-91 Re: UUencode Erik M. van der
Poel(_at_)sra (788)
I disagree. If you recommend particular versions of uuencode,
implementors will be encouraged to use the uuencode that comes with
the OS. When people port the source of such a UA to a different
platform, there is no guarantee that the uuencode version will be OK.
So I think the RFC should say that implementations *must* do their own
uuencoding. This also means that we need to include a full definition
of safe uuencode in the RFC. And if people are worried that
implementing uuencode is too hard, we can even include a free safe
implementation of uuencode in an appendix.
But if we're doing this, we've just given up on the original motivation
(which I never shared) for allowing uuencode, which is that there are
lots of implementations that already exist!
This discussion has only further convinced me that we should NOT support
uuencode...