Re: [MacPerl] CPAN

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 11:56 -0500 1/15/97, Paul J. Schinder wrote:
>Because of 1.  If you think dealing with *.sit.bin is too hard for the
>average MacPerl user, imagine dealing with .tar.gz.  I agree that
>*.hqx causes less trouble than *.bin, because it's almost impossible
>to screw up, but if they can get .tar.gz done right, they can
>certainly get .sit.bin done right.  The two major Mac ftp clients
>autodetect MacBinary out of the box, and it should certainly be
>possible to get the http front end to CPAN to spit out the MIME type
>commonly used for MacBinary before sending the file.

Not to mention Netscape Navigator's 100% certainty of mangling a .bin file
until some fairly recent version (which seems not to mangle them, but I
almost always copy the URL and run Fetch, just in case, and primarily use
MSIE anyhow so I can't be sure).

That error in Navigator helped prevent several earlier attempts to kill off
.hqx (although not the first several years' worth of attempts, which
preceeded Navigator's losing the Netscape Mosaic name by longer than the
Web's duration to that point), which will be with us forever.  For that
matter, tar will be with us forever, probably with *its* known warts.

   --John