cart tapes

[paul@taos.intel.com (Paul Collier)]

I have occasionally heard rumors of pending improvements to the cart
tape system, as of the QIC 100 drives that the XL's and others use; the
most significant improvement being the ability to append to a tape. I've
even seen comments in the system source pertaining to that.

After looking at the backup system code, opening some streams, etc. and
manually forcing the stream instance from a :READ state into a :WRITE
state, it seems like it shouldn't be too difficult to kluge up an append
method. Before I re-invent something though, I'd like to know if said
improvement already exists somewhere?

Thanks much,
Paul Collier
Intel Albuquerque