From: daz <dooby@...10.karoo.co.uk>
Date: 2003-09-13T20:20:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and NNTP attachments


"Hal Fulton" <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:

> 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 ... :)


> 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
http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/e-mail-book/usenet-news.html


daz