Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 00:03:45 +0000 () From: James Raynard <fqueries@jraynard.demon.co.uk> To: Don Yuniskis <dgy@rtd.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: perhaps i am just stupid. Message-ID: <199608070003.AAA06785@jraynard.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <199608061917.MAA07140@seagull.rtd.com> from "Don Yuniskis" at Aug 6, 96 12:17:01 pm
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[re checksumming dist files before installation] > > I can see problems fitting this into the download-and-extract-on-the-fly > > scheme of things. For instance, if you're downloading over a modem, > > and bin.aa is corrupted, would you really want to have to wait until > > everything up to bin.cx has come down before finding it out? > > (Especially if it's some sort of systematic error and every file > > you've spent the last two hours downloading is corrupt...) > > Ah, I wasn't advocating putting it into the "automated" path. > Rather, consider someone who has *manually* ftp'ed stuff onto > their DOS box and then started to unpack it all. This would > give them a tool to test the integrity of each file before > gzip chokes on it (which some of the recent posts seem to be > griping about). OK, I was rambling a bit about why things had changed since "the good old days". I think basically we're in violent agreement :-) > > > how about: > > > cksum *.* > fudge > > > comp fudge goodsums.lst Out of interest, is cksum supplied as a DOS program? I can't seem to find it, but I've only got the 2.1.0 CDROM here. If it isn't, maybe the best answer would be to port it to DOS in such a way that it would handle DOS's feeble globbing, and do any other useful things we could think of - perhaps it could put up a simple menu where you could say which dists you wanted to install (this would also have the advantage of checking that the user had got the directory structure right). (In case anyone isn't familiar with "globbing", if you type "foo *" in a Unix shell, the shell expands the * and passes the program the names of all the file in the directory. If you type the equivalent "foo *.*" at a DOS command prompt, the program has to work them out for itself).
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