Distributing files on a Unix system.

[sjameson@fergie.atl.ge.com (Stephen M Jameson)]

Some people at my installation have a system which is split between some files
in a LMFS (Genera 8.1.1) and some files on a Sun Workstation (SunOS 4.1.2),
which is connected to the Symbolics cluster by TCP (We still have not been able
to get NFS working properly, but that's another issue).  They are trying to do
a Distribute System operation, and are running into two problems.

First, when Genera looks for the first of the files which resides on the Unix
system, and for each one thereafter if you skip the first one, it comes back
with the error "Cannot find a length for file X, must be an opaque link".  I
went into the debugger and found that it was in the function
DIS:DISTRIBUTION-ARRAY.  Looking at the internal state, I found that local
variables included a list of property lists for the various files involved.
The files which were on the Unix system had property lists which included the
property :LENGTH-IN-BYTES, but the function was looking for either :LENGTH, or
:LENGTH-IN-BLOCKS, and produced an error if it could not find either.  I
patched the function, just to check, so that it interpreted :LENGTH-IN-BYTES
the same as :LENGTH, and the distribution proceeded correctly.  My question is:
has anyone else encountered this problem, and is there a patch available for it
(i.e. ECO tape).  I am uncomfortable with a hand-patched system file,
particularly since it must be manually loaded to be effective.

Second, when Genera takes a logical pathname and translates it into a Unix
physical pathname, it automatically seems to generate file names in all lower
case letters.  This caused another problem, which we got around by converting
all Unix files to all lower case, but this was a bit inconvenient.  Is there
anyway to specify in a logical pathname that the file should have some mix of
lower and upper case letters?


Steve Jameson                           General Electric Aerospace 
sjameson@atl.ge.com                     Advanced Technology Laboratories
                                        Moorestown, New Jersey              
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