In <01KG3T1CQDU400004D(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com>
ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com writes:
Well, yEnc as presently formulated has a failure mode where some messages
will grow to 2X their original size. I also don't like the fact that
it shifts the range of almost every character. It is possible to fix both
of these problems and have an encoding with an upper bound guarantee that
leaves the original data mostly untouched.
Just my personal take -- neither of these are necessarily showstoppers.
I think every encoding scheme has a pathological case which produces a "2X
their original size" situation. I think such an accurrence is wildly
improbable in the yEnc case.
AIUI, the reason for the range shifting is that the NUL character tends to
occur with more than its random probability in typical binaries (even to
the extent of huge sequences of NUL bytes). Therefore, it is desirable
that NUL itself can be transported without stuffing (or course, some other
random character then gets saddled with that honour).
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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