Restore Distribution

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Mon, 22 Oct 90 14:31 EDT
    From: Robert W. Kerns <RWK@fuji.ila.com>

	Date: Mon, 22 Oct 90 11:50 EDT
	From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)

	    Date: Sat, 20 Oct 90 13:02:50 EDT
	    From: rwtucker@starbase.MITRE.ORG (Richard W. Tucker)

		Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 17:38:37 EDT
		From: orgren@RTC.Reston.Unisys.COM (Paul Orgren)

		Just having gone through loading Genera 8.0, I would argue that the
		"Restore Distribution" ...
					   To de-select .IBIN files and ...

	    I suppose you could define the logical pathname Sys: **; *.ibin to
	    translate to a null device...  but I don't know how to create a
	    Symbolics pathname that works as a null device.  I've wanted one on
	    occasion.

	There is no null file system in Genera, although there's a null stream
	(#'SYS:NULL-STREAM).  If you have a Unix file server and you're using
	FTP to access it you could translate sys:**;*.ibin to unix:/dev/null
	(this won't work if you're using NFS, as it doesn't support remote
	access to device files).

							barmar
    It's not hard to add.  I once had a implementation of things like access to
    buffers, windows, etc., but this was never installed because of some feeling
    that "you shouldn't do things like this via pathnames, you should have a user
    interface".  Thus we have weird bits of ui like the :Output Destination CP
    command.

One thing I realized about the above use of the NULL: host is that the
logical pathname facility doesn't like more than one logical path to
translate to the same physical path.  So if you define "SYS:**;*.IBIN.*"
to translate to "NULL:" then you'll get lots of complaints about
duplication when you restore the distribution.

                                                barmar