paul marwick wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 pm>> A number of ASCII characters have been known to cause InpsectA 
 pm>> problems. None of them should be in a FILES.BBS entry, but some 
 pm>> of the entries that arrive here (especially in the games 
 pm>> related areas) certainly do contain them.

 RJT> That's really odd, I thought that it was a much better written
 RJT> program than that...  And that behavior is a violation of something
 RJT> I read a while back, written by P. J. Plauger,  to the effect that
 RJT> "no program should leave its sanity at the mercy of its input"!

 pm> :) I agree - it should be a lot better than that. I guess David 
 pm> just didn't anticpate some of the rubbish that people migh 
 pm> consider putting into description files. 

But that's the whole point -- you _can't_ anticipate things like that,  so a
program should be designed to just deal with it somehow,  and in a sensible
manner,  and not get weird over it.

 pm> I could never see the point - the description is supposed to 
 pm> tell you (briefly) what the file is for, not provide a a visual
 pm> display...

Exactly.  I have my own preferred format for my files listings,  which is so
many characters offset from the left after the line displayed containing the
filename,  size,  and date -- and this is different in the software that
generates my downloadable files lists,  yet in either case they simply take
the "one-long-line" data that they're handed and deal with them appropriately, 
not truncating or cutting words in the middle or similar nonsense like I've
seen some software do.

But I could go on at length on this topic,  and already have on occasion.   
I'll probably write an article for fidonews one of these days...

 pm>> There problably aren't - I was betateting a new version when he 
 pm>> pulled the plug on it.

 RJT> What a shame,  really,  as I like the program a lot.

 pm> So do I. It still suits me better than any of the alternatives, 
 pm> but, given the bugs, I no longer seem to have much of a choice.

Well,  since I haven't had a problem with it for the most part I will likely
continue to use it,  at least the dos version to some degree and the OS/2
version somewhat.  I have "midnight commander" under Linux but don't care for
the "command" portion of that,  or a whole lot else in there,  although a
bunch of the function keys are the same,  fortunately.  Maybe one of these
days if I get real confident I'll have a look at the source and see if I can
whip it into some semblance of what I'm used to dealing with.  



 pm> The majority of self-extractors are handled fine. However, the 
 pm> ones that aren't are a real pain. Its a pity, since (IMHO) 
 pm> InspectA handles the ones that it does work with better than 
 pm> anything else around - pressing return to see what is in the 
 pm> file is (to me) much preferable to having it try to execute the 
 pm> file...

Yes!  At least I know I can configure _that_ in that silly program I mentioned 
up there.  (Though I still haven't gotten around to it.)



 RJT> Yeah,  that's about what I've done on the dos box here.  And I'll
 RJT> probably end up writing a short batch file to convert those anyway, 
 RJT> so as to make stuff more accessible to people...

 pm> I use RAR a lot (registered a copy of the OS/2 version two or 
 pm> three years ago). And, since I find it more effective than many 
 pm> of the other archivers, I'm not going to be converting away 
 pm> from it...

Effective how,  in terms of space?  Or speed?  I used to worry about space, 
but saw a post earlier in another echo about 8.4G drives for $99 (don't know
if this is a rebate thingy or what),  so I sure ain't worried about it the way 
I used to be.

 pm>> unfortunately) truncate descriptions at 512 characters. Which 
 pm>> mucks things up royally...

 RJT> Since my editor won't go beyond that point I hadn't noticed.

 pm> :-) Time you got an updated editor... I use FED )FED025S.ZIP) 
 pm> which is free, small enough to go on a floppy and works well... 
 pm> Can be made to work pretty much like Qedit as well.

I'll have to look around for it.  How big is the package it comes in?

 RJT> I used to hang out in C_ECHO,  ages ago.  Enough that I got invited
 RJT> to moderate it twice (and turned it down twice :-).  It's been ages, 
 RJT> and I have to get a handle on GNU,  the Unix Way Of Doing Things, 
 RJT> and assorted other stuff,  but at least at this point I can look at
 RJT> some code and understand what I'm looking at to some extent.  I may
 RJT> just end up getting back into it,  I don't know...

 pm> :-) Can I place an order forr an updated InspectA clone now?

You'd definitely be in mind for it,  bringing these discussions into here, 
which I've enjoyed.  To run under Linux?  I sure don't have OS/2 tools on hand 
here...  

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