sharutils: uudecode(1) suggestions (fwd)

[Santiago Vila]

Hello.

I received this from the Debian bug system.
[ Please keep the Cc: lines when replying. Thanks ].

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J S Bygott <address@hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <address@hidden>
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:09:58 +0000
Subject: sharutils: uudecode(1) suggestions

Package: sharutils
Version: 1:4.6.3-0
Severity: minor
Tags: patch

Thank you for recently fixing some very old issues with this manpage.

May I make a further suggestion?

I think the main paragraph for uuencode is currently quite unclear and
also inaccurate.  Unclear because of the future tense combined with jumping
between the description of encoding and decoding.  Inaccurate, because _name_
is only a *suggestion* ("uudecode -o" can override the name).

How about the following text instead?

   Uuencode reads _file_ (or by default the standard input) and writes an
   encoded version to the standard output, using only printing ASCII
   characters.  The encoded output begins with a header, for use by uudecode,
   which records the mode of the input file and suggests  _name_  for the
   decoded file that will be created.  (If _name_ is /dev/stdout then
   uudecode will decode to standard output.)  The encoding has the format
   documented at uuencode(5), unless the option -m is given, when base64
   encoding is used instead.

I attach a fairly small patch for this.

Actually, would you consider a patch for bigger changes?
For a start, the manpage should use fonts in a more standard way.

More importantly, I think BUGS should list something like this:

  o  uudecode silently overwrites _name_ if it exists already
 
  o  uudecode accepts names like ../foo

Thus, users would at least be warned that they should always inspect the
header lines or use the -o option.

(If you judge that this belongs upstream, I'd be grateful if you could
forward it, thank you.)

Yours,

(Dr) Jeremy Bygott
Oxford

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0

patch
Description: Text document