Re: MSDOS name conversion
"brian (b.c.) white" <bcwhite@bnr.ca) wrote on 13.02.96 in <"3094 Tue Feb 13 17:09:55 1996"@bnr.ca>>:
> >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.
> See my previous comments about running "split" after the FTP is done, and
> the algorithm to pack floppies efficiently.
I already had seen it. It didn't convince me.
> >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
>
> I could. The FTP protocol is quite simple. Splitting after download is
> easier, though.
Umm ... you may have forgotten that under MS-DOS, there is no standard TCP/
IP stack. Instead, there are several completely incompatible ones, and
most have no public documentation.
I don't believe you could.
> Really? No where is there "split" for OS/2? Are you sure? I'll bet there
Nowhere in the system.
> is pkzip for OS/2 and it should handle splitting across floppies. Of
It might, though I don't have it (I'm not even sure it exists). I have the
Info-Zip, and if it can do that, I stll have to find out how. And I have
yet to find a need for splitting.
And anyway, you're now talking third party software. Do *you* want to make
sure a program to do this for every possible operating system a downloader
could have is somewhere on the Debian ftp archive, some of which will
undoubtably not be free software?
> Why is a simple DOS program that splits FTP'd package files optimally among
> many floppies a *lot* worse? Why is it worse at all?
Don't forget the impossible task of splitting them during receive.
It's a lot worse because it puts a lot of work on a lot of people, many of
whom probably aren't very good at that stuff in the first place, instead
of putting only very little work on very few people.
MfG Kai
Reply to: