Distribute System from non-Symbolics?

[David Vinayak Wallace <Gumby@MCC.COM>]

    Date: Fri, 23 Jun 89 12:50 EDT
    From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

	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))

Which, as is typical of unix, depends on undocumented and
liable-to-change behaviour.  FTP servers may supply whichever switches
they want to the directory command; different versions of unix default
to different display formats.