Carry tape

[barmar@THINK.COM]

    Date: Sun, 12 Feb 89 00:08 PST
    From: Gumby@mcc.com (David Vinayak Wallace)

    What about writing a tar tape?  Your customers can load it with
    tape:read-tar-tape.

I thought of this, and just gave it a try.  ZL-USER:READ-TAR-TAPE is
very buggy.  It gets the file and directory names wrong if it's
writing to a Unix file server (it inverts case and adds null
suffixes).  And it uses OPEN :DIRECTION :PROBE wrong (it expects it to
signal a file-not-found error, but it actually just returns NIL), so
it will only create one entry in a directory (it handles
directory-not-found properly).

The problem with writing to a Unix file server isn't serious, because
if you want the tape to go onto Unix you could always read it there
directly.  But the second problem is fatal.

    They'll have to wrap a signal handler around the call, though.

I don't understand this.  While it didn't work right, it never
signalled any errors.

By the way, READ-TAR-TAPE wasn't even compiled (or if it was, the
binary wasn't sent out with 7.2).

						barmar