GNU uuencode and uudecode have an history which roots
are lost in ages, and we will not even try to trace it. The current
versions were brought into GNU by Ian Lance Taylor, and later
modernized by Ulrich Drepper. GNU shar surely has a long
history, too. All along this long road, numerous users contributed
various improvements. The file THANKS in the distribution,
as far as we know, contain the names of all contributors we could
identify, and for which email addresses are seemingly valid.
Please help us getting the history straight, for the following
information is somewhat approximative. James Gosling wrote the
public domain shar 1.x. William Davidsen rewrote it as
shar 2.x. Warren Tucker implemented modifications and called
it shar 3.x. Richard Gumpertz maintained it until 1990.
François Pinard, from the public domain shar 3.49, made
GNU shar 4.x, in 1994. Some modules and other code sections
were freely borrowed from other GNU distributions, bringing this
shar under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Your feedback helps us to make a better and more portable product. Mail suggestions and bug reports (including documentation errors) for these programs to bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu.