Distribute System from non-Symbolics?

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Fri, 23 Jun 89 11:32 EDT
    From: ESC@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com (Eric S. Crawley)

    If the only path to the Sun over TCP-FTP, you will not be able to use it
    for system distribution.  TCP-FTP does not provide a reliable way to
    obtain file properties such as length.

Why not?  Here's a line from (:parse-directory-response unix-tcp-ftp-file-access-path):

	     (add-property :length-in-bytes (parse-number (pop tokens) 0 nil 10 t))

                                                barmar