Re: MSDOS name conversion

["brian (b.c.) white" <bcwhite@bnr.ca>]

>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.

Thank you for your confidence.  As I said, it _is_ doable (obviously not be
me, though) though there is little point.  There is no reason split cannot
run after the download is complete.  I've already mentioned running without
a hard drive.

>> Really?  No where is there "split" for OS/2?  Are you sure?  I'll bet there
>
>Nowhere in the system.

You mean... the "stock" system that installs from floppy/cdrom?  Ah.  And,
of course, that stock system did come with "gunzip" and "rawrite" to create
the original base disks, so the user has never encountered 3rd party
software before this moment.


>> 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.

Info-Zip and PKZip are not the same thing.

>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?

I don't need to make sure.  There already is.  You just have to know where
to look.

>> 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.

How could I forget.  You've brought it up three times in this one message.

>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.

It actually puts less work on the user because they don't have to worry
about copying files to floppies.  The only added problem is getting the
split program in the first place and learning how to use it.  If these
people are going to be using Unix, they had better be able to type a
command line.

Writing the intelligent split program is pretty trivial.

Anyway, I'm not going to repeat myself any more.  I'm now dropping out
of this thread.  *vanishes*

                                        Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@bnr.ca )

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    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.