Re: MSDOS name conversion
"brian (b.c.) white" <bcwhite@bnr.ca) wrote on 13.02.96 in <"21221 Tue Feb 13 09:57:55 1996"@bnr.ca>>:
By the way ...
> First, who ever said life was fair? Second, I don't see how fair means
> cluttering up the distribution so a few people can have a slightly easier
> time, _once_. That isn't fair to me or anybody else who already has it
> installed. Third, it doesn't change the availability. It just changes
> the steps required to get it.
Umm - "once"? Why only once?
For people without ftp access from their Debian machine, I expect it's
quite typical that they do all their upgrades via floppies.
For people with bad lines, those lines don't magically get better for
their upgrades.
In short, I expect that most people that benefit from split files will
benefit not once, but for each upgrade they'll do.
And furthermore, I expect people who can handle the unsplit original
packages will not have any trouble doing a mget instead of a get and
getting all pieces of a split package. Most probably already do a mget
instead of typing in the whole long package name.
The longer I read this thread, the more I get convinced that we should
simply stop having gigantic, unsplit packages in Debian. There's not
really any benefit in having them, and there is obvious benefit in having
split packages.
This, of course, all depends on dpkg being able to handle split packages.
If we were talking about the usual .tar.gz stuff, then there'd be an
obvious benefit in *not* splitting them, as they would have to be rejoined
by hand - which can easily break.
> It sounds like you have quite a serious limitation, here, but not one
> that can't be overcome the same way. Why does "split" have to work on
> existing files? Write "split" in perl that uses "ftp.pl" and splits the
> stream as it comes down. If you have to FTP one file at a time and then
> copy that file to a disk, then you are already in hell. Having "split"
> keep the transfer going while you copy it's latest output to disk could
> only help you.
Nice. Now do the same under MS-DOS. That's the sort of system I did my
first FTPs from, several years ago. Fortunately, I had room. If I hadn't
...
Anyway, I don't see why you want to have some people jump through hoops to
prevent others from imaginary problems.
> A perl script would handle most implementations. Not to mention, which of
> these platforms don't already have some sort of "split" program? Don't
> tell me you're running OS/2 or NT from floppy?
Why do you think OS/2 or NT *need* a "split" program? (Incidentally, at
least OS/2 doesn't have one.)
> BOTTOM LINE: There are better solutions than splitting the files in the
> distribution.
BOTTOM LINE: You certainly didn't show any solution I would not call a
*lot* worse.
MfG Kai
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