Ruby and NNTP attachments

ruby-talk
1

I’ve been playing with NNTP a day or two.

The lib by Jeff Heard and Ward Wouts seems to work fine
for me, but I’m clueless about attachments.

What’s the deal? Does Usenet universally know MIME
nowadays, or do we still do uuencoding?

Either way, how do I make it work? Do I have to worry
about a max size?

Thanks for any guidance.

Hal

2

I’ve been playing with NNTP a day or two.

The lib by Jeff Heard and Ward Wouts seems to work fine

(A port from Python, supporting:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc977.html )

This (from nazgul):
http://bsd.org.yu/~psy_eye/dwn/nntp.rb

supports rfc977 and started support for NNTP extensions (?):
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2980.html

… but I’m clueless about attachments.

Is there a club ?

What’s the deal? Does Usenet universally know MIME
nowadays, or do we still do uuencoding?

My impression is that MIME is forcing its way in,
rather than becoming accepted.

Either way, how do I make it work?

I found this helpful:
http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/decode.htm

which suggests that attachment is a concept. It’s
really part of the message body.

So, uuencoded attachments are a begin/end block.

How does one uuencode ?

A language which provides support would be most
helpful. One such could be Ruby (www.ruby-lang.org).

Array#pack “u”
String#unpack “u”

** (I tried not to look surprised:)

(un)pack also seems to provide:

“M” Quoted printable, MIME encoding (see RFC2045)
“m” Base64 encoded string

** (Again, I tried not to … :slight_smile:

Do I have to worry about a max size?

Lots of people don’t worry, but I saw 50K
mentioned as a ‘pain threshold’ at one site.

Thanks for any guidance.

Hal

A picture of Usenet

daz

···

“Hal Fulton” hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:

3

I’ve seen less and less uuencoding over the years, but it’s still around.
Something I see a lot of lately in the binary newsgroups is “yenc”
(http://www.yenc.org). As a counterpoint, check out
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/yenc.html, but I don’t think jeremy’s doing
much more than tilting at windmills, frankly.

As for size, one accepted “standard” size I see is to break up your posts into
roughly 472500 to 315000 bytes per segment, “for best propagation”.
(MP3 Binaries FAQ - alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* (04/19/05) , section 4.13) Your goal
may not BE propogation, so that argument may not be relevant.

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Hal Fulton [mailto:hal9000@hypermetrics.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 4:17 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Ruby and NNTP attachments

I’ve been playing with NNTP a day or two.

The lib by Jeff Heard and Ward Wouts seems to work fine
for me, but I’m clueless about attachments.

What’s the deal? Does Usenet universally know MIME
nowadays, or do we still do uuencoding?

Either way, how do I make it work? Do I have to worry
about a max size?