Re: Storing lispm files on Unix boxes vs Unix

[magerman@linc.cis.upenn.edu]

     I was getting really upset at how many sources we didn't have for 8.0
     until I found out what happened...

     We stored most of the 8.0 sources on a Unix host (via NFS).  All was
     fine and we had about 110MB of space used up by them (including the
     layered products we have).   In the last few days, I had griped about
     some sources not being there when I thought they should.  I'd go back to
     7.2 sources and they'd be there.

     Today I found some documentation files weren't there and I was quite
     unhappy.  I then looked at how much room we were using on the Unix host
     and found out it was only 3MB.

     It turns out we run a program to delete "useless" files on our Unix host
     (such as core, a.out :-).  One thing it deletes are files that end in
     "~" (eg, Gnuemacs backup files) after 7 days without access.  *ALL* the
     files stored under our rel-8-0.sct directory ended in that character
     (ie, "foo.bar.~99~").

     So, if you think about storing Lispm files on your Unix box, make sure you
     don't get bit by this!  (Anybody have good solutions?  We're trying to
     figure out what we want to do.  We've turned off deleting those files for
     now.)

For ILA-NFS, we had a simple patch for this problem:
	(setf nfs::*unix-pseudoversion-prefix* ".")
	(setf nfs::*unix-pseudoversion-suffix* "")
This causes versioned files to appear in UNIX file systems as foo.bar.99
instead of the foo.bar.~99~.  We found all the tildes to be downright
offensive, so we just got rid of them.

In NFS under Genera 7.4, I believe that redefining the constants
	(defconst fs::*unix-version-prefix* ".")
	(defconst fs::*unix-version-prefix* "")
will accomplish the same goal.  I imagine the same hack will work for NFS under
Genera 8.0.

-- David Magerman
formerly  University of Pennsylvania LINC Lab (magerman@linc.cis.upenn.edu)
currently  Unisys CAIT (magerman@prc.unisys.com)
eventually  Stanford University