In <yly9g38fa1(_dot_)fsf(_at_)windlord(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu> Russ Allbery
<rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu> writes:
Dan Kohn <dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com> writes:
I don't mean to open a rat hole here, but has the use of gzip as part of
the yEnc encoding been seriously considered?
It's not really been considered for Usenet because essentially all of the
binaries posted to Usenet are already compressed. (GIFs, JPEGs, MP3s, ZIP
files, compressed movies, etc.) A compressed CTE would be a lot more
useful in mail than on Usenet.
Indeed so.
BTW, and changing the topic, does anyone know when the patent behind GIFs
expires?
(Why some compressed formats have large sections of NULs, I have no idea.
That makes me think that either some of those compression formats are less
than ideal or the advantages of byte-shifting have been overstated.)
Yes, I didn't quite understand that (I was just passing on the reason for
byte shifting as I had seen it explained).
But there is another problem with a gzip CTE, which is that you may have
gzip on top of Base64, or gzip on top of yEnc, or qzip on top of whatever
else. Maybe, in an ideal world, one would define an encoding (yEnc say)
and then define a gzip option inside that.
Or maybe you could define a compression=gzip parameter that could be used
with any CTE. That would seem to be more flexible.
As for the yEnc CTE, it has been explained to the people concerned that
favourable noises have been made here, and that they ought to come here
and pursue it themselves, but no response yet. My only role in this was to
try and break the impasses/standoff that seemed to have been reached.
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