Talk:yEnc

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This article is massively POV and does not adequately explain how yEnc actually works. References to uudecode and it's design deficiencies would perhaps be better understood if the principles were more adequately explained. What does structured vs. unstructured fields mean? Of what relevance is innaccuracies of reporting yEnc uptake on the website? I'd also suggest that the parenthesised segways were footnoted, or re-written to be presented after the main content. -- Jon Dowland 10:22, 25 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, i have read yEnc specification. I was even trying to implement something based on it, but reading it all, i can say that whole yEnc is just a joke, it have many obvious (and many non-obvious) bugs, and it is useless as any kind of standard. Just stay away from it (unless it is at least fixed to being properly specified). And regarding previous comment above - wikipedia cannot tell how yEnc actually works, becuase specification on yEnc website do not tell either. To know how it works one needs to do some reverse-enginering and search in examples to try understand what-author-have-on-their-mind. --87.239.216.2 (talk) 03:19, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thunderbird

The current stable version of Mozilla Thunderbird directly supports YEnc. So I am removing the Mozilla reference in the paragraph about major newsreaders that do not support YEnc.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.99.213.82 (talk • contribs), July 27, 2006

This is correct, some less than ideal sourcing here and I have tried it with the current version of Thunderbird. If you add a yEnc attachment to a mail or news message, eg a photo, Thunderbird will decode it, whereas in Outlook Express etc it will be rendered as ASCII text gobbledegook. However, Thunderbird will not handle NZB files, or multipart binaries requiring RAR and PAR operations to extract the files. This means that Thunderbird's yEnc support is at best partial, although it will decode individual files.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 09:07, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

RAR and PAR has nothing to do with yEnc. They just happen to be large binaries that get posted using multiple messages. Do you mean it fails to handle multipart messages? It can only decode files that fit into a single message? --Ondertitel (talk) 09:42, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, typical posting of large binary files on Usenet involves the use of split RAR files and PAR as well as yEnc. Thunderbird will not handle this type of encoding and a program such as Unzbin is required. Some of the files posted on Usenet run into several gigabytes and are split into parts of 50-100 MB before uploading. If a yEnc file is split over multiple messages, it will not be decoded by Thunderbird.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 15:04, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An explanation of the key reason yEnc exists would be useful:

There's something very basic that is not currently explained in the article, and which leaves the reader (at least me) boggled: it seems yEnc encodes 8-bit data in... 8-bit data. How, why, what?! I'm sure there's a perfectly good and valid explanation for it, it's just not present in the article in its current form. 2A02:8109:9300:2C4:600E:E6BC:737C:88A6 (talk) 10:34, 6 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually most of the algorithm is useless, as its basically just a ROT42 over the complete 8 bit value range and if the output would be certain forbidden characters (NUL, CR, LF, TAB, escape character) they get escaped (using = as escape character and escaping via a ROT64). The first step is just unnecessary as the sole purpose of the algoritm - avoiding the forbidden characters - could be achieved if just the escaping step would be performed on the input. --Mps (talk) 14:02, 23 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The page says "... as an optimization yEnc adds 42 to every source byte so that data with large stretches of 0x00 values does not require a lot of escaping." But of course such large stretches would not appear if even basic file compression were used on the input - and if you're posting binaries to Usenet (multipart postings, at that), you would be using file compression.

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