Date   : Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:23:27 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: Copying between file servers

On 25/09/2010 18:30, J.G.Harston wrote:

> Ah, Mark's using a Filestore.

Ah, say no more then! :-)

The FileStore appears to do a number of unsupported things in the 
digital equivalent of the gallic shrug.


> the Filestore returns dodgy results from unsupported NetFS_Op calls that
> confuses NetFS 5.78, causing it to generate an error instead of /returning/
> the error result.

Mmmm. I recall running into a problem with my FSUtil crashing because it 
was getting pre-1981 dates from the FileStore and faulting them. Ideally 
this should not be possible, but on the other hand NetFS ought to be a 
bit more bulletproof.


> NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS IN AN EDITOR! Zip (and UnZip) is crunched and
> loading it into an editor will destroy it as the editor fails to
> retokenise the code on saving.

There speaks a man who has never used !Zap. ;-)

I think World+Kitten ought to know that !Edit is dire crap when it comes 
to anything beyond the complexity of basic script files, but there are 
viable pointy-clicky options.

In the interests of fairness, I should point out that !StrongEd is 
probably much the same, however I just 'got on' with !Zap. I think it is 
much the same way as Ovation(Pro)/Impression, you'll find people that 
liked one or the other but rarely both. I dunno, I just hated how 
Impression worked, and got on great with Ovation. But, hey, before that 
I was using AcornDTP but some little bugger at school stole it. Did me a 
favour, to be honest, ADTP was *horrible*. I really hope there's a copy 
of it kicking around some <cough>software archive</cough> so people can 
experience just how icky it really was!

Anyway, I digress...


> Then it should work for FileStore. It will ignore MDFS metadata, but
> Mark's only zipping up FileStore metadata anyway.

That's the sad problem of not all file servers being equal. Thankfully 
much of the metadata isn't that relevant. It could be worse, I suppose. 
[from memory] I would imagine FileStore -> RISC OS would lose either 
time/date or load/exec, as RISC OS can't do both at the same time. Given 
the files involved, I really hope Level4 is smart enough to dump 
time/date in preference of retaining load/exec!


Best wishes,


Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...