----- Original Message -----
From: "David C. Rankin"
Felix Miata wrote:
contribute to popularity. These top-10 that I am or have been on munge: <snip> ...................... in favor of munging.
OK,
I give, WTF are munge & munging?
To munge just means to alter or modify. Usually for some good intention, but really the more important thing to think about is that the data was altered, which IMO is just about always more trouble than it's worth. A classic example is ftp. The ftp protocol (or maybe it's just something every ftp daemon or client impliments by convention and isn't really part of the protocol spec itself I don't know) includes a feature to automatically translate the line-endings in plain text data passing from one platform to another when those platforms have diferent line-ending conventions. The most common example is between dos/windows and unix, but mac used to have a different convention too. The idea was to have files that "just worked" from the users point of view on both sides. You have a text file on unix that a user wrote in vi. It looks fine to him. A windows user downloads it via ftp and he expects to look at it in notepad. If the the ftp transfer was done in ascii mode, then all the LF's in the original unix file were replaced with CRLF along the way, and in that case, the file does "just work" and the windows user will see sensible lines in notepad that look the same as what the unix vi user saw. The data was munged by ftp. I personally wish that feature were never incorporated into ftp however, because it has been the result of countless countless "bad downloads" where the ftp client mistakenly decided that some file was plain text and that it was OK to modify the data. I still have to help practically every one of the other developers in my shop any time they have to deal with any EDI transactions that go over ftp. If the people on both sides were simply required to know that there even are such things as different line-endings, at least on our end we can read and write any kind of data just fine. If it has CRLF's and we need to generate data with them, that's fine. It's only trying to hide the difference and trying to automatically translate it using too simple of a rule that has caused no end of head banging by people who don't happen to be sys admins but higher level developers that expect their data to be handled without being modified by the communication layer. sysadmins too. They download a floppy image or a tar file on a windows box because the old sco unix or xenix box at the customer site has no internet, then drive xxx miles out to customer site and the floppy or tar is junk. Notice that the newer invention sftp has no such feature. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://profile.to/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org