Distribute System from non-Symbolics?

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Fri, 23 Jun 89 13:40 PDT
    From: Gumby@mcc.com (David Vinayak Wallace)

	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.

But the behavior HASN'T changed.  The question was about Suns, and I
tried it with our Suns and it works fine (I tried it on Suns running
SunOS 3.5 and 4.0.1).  Also, if the format of the response changes in a
way that invalidates the above routine, it should go into the debugger,
not silently leave out the :LENGTH-IN-BYTES property.

                                                barmar