wp2latex (1 of 4)

[a.k.a. Chri]

peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <1990Aug14.003446.19241 at NCoast.ORG> allbery at ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR/KT) writes:
>> alt.sources isn't moderated....
>Which is why I'm making this request, and trying to pursuade people to
>put the header on postings to alt.sources. Heaven knows, some of these
>people are first class programmers. It's not that hard, and there's
>certainly no good reason to *not* put the header in there.

I can't take this any more.  Do you what one has to go through to post
stuff to the net?  (Actually, you probably do.) As the recent author
of the lj2ps program (posted to comp.sources.misc), I have had some
first-hand experience doing this.  Let me tell you, it ain't fun, it
ain't intuitive, and it ain't easy.  

Aside from the system dependencies that one has to worry about, there
are quite a few annoying things that one has to do just to get the
program out there.  I had to install a new version of shar just to get
my program easily split into less-than-50k chunks.  Then, after
carefully packaging the stuff up, I unpacked it and recompiled it,
just to make sure all of the packing worked (i.e. I wasn't losing
characters in the shar files).  I did this several times, and I still
messed up my first posting (I forgot about all of the escape
characters in the Test Suite). 

What I am trying to point out is that it takes a fair bit of "know
how" to package programs up for the net.  And I am not just a casual
user of USENET.  I have been reading netnews for five years now.  I
have also installed CNews on our machine.  And *I* have a hard time
posting to the net!  I wonder how other less knowledgable users get
through this experience.

About the archive-header issue: Peter, I have read your postings for
quite a while, including much in comp.sys.amiga.  I respect your views
a lot, and will usually read your articles just because you wrote
them.  However, I disagree with current your complaint that people
should be using these special archive-header.  If you want them to use
it, then you must make it *painfully* obvious that it is necessary.
Why do I say this?  Because before you brought it up lately, I had
*never* heard of this archive-header.  And I am not a "casual user."

>> They split it because the news software often rejects it otherwise.  They
>> shar it because the net flames them if they don't.
>Well, consider this a kindler and gentler version of the same thing...

I think what is needed is some document (argh, yet another document!)
stating all the stuff that one needs to go through to post programs to
the net.  And it needs to be put someplace very obvious, so everyone
knows it exists and has access to it when they want to post programs
to be shared.

As it stands now, posting software to the net is a big
pain-in-the-ass.  It is certainly not an experience that I want to go
through again soon.  If we want more people to post more useful stuff
to the net, we need to make it much easier to do so (and not
*harder*).  Complaining about yet-another-obscure-header is not
helping.  If posting software to the net becomes any harder, the
authors of the programs may not distribute just because it is a
time-consuming and frustrating task to actually get the software out
on the USENET. 

-- 
Christopher Lishka 608-262-4485  "Dad, don't give in to mob mentality!"
Wisconsin State Lab. of Hygiene                                -- Bart Simpson
   lishka at uwslh.slh.wisc.edu     "I'm not, Son.  I'm jumping on the bandwagon."
   uunet!uwvax!uwslh!lishka                                    -- Homer Simpson