Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!pcrat!rick
From: rick@pcrat.uucp (Rick Richardson)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: v08i093: System V disk compactor
Summary: Not yet on 16 bit machines
Keywords: packdisk pcc patches
Message-ID: <1989Oct14.130123.1067@pcrat.uucp>
Date: 14 Oct 89 13:01:23 GMT
References: <69626@uunet.UU.NET> <1383@rebel.UUCP>
Reply-To: rick@pcrat.UUCP (Rick Richardson)
Organization: PC Research, Inc., Tinton Falls, NJ
Lines: 38

In article <1383@rebel.UUCP> george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe) writes:
>I've just tested Andy Fyfe's "packdisk" posted to comp.sources.misc,
>volume 8, issue 93.  It's great!  Thanks Andy.
>
>My system is a UniPlus System V.0 and packdisk worked without fault.

I would like to warn people that even after applying Georges patches,
which are good, there are still some other problems with packdisk.
I haven't been brave enough to test my changes on anything other
than floppy filesystems.  The program has a rather cavalier attitude
towards mixing "int" and "long".  These show up as calculations
that will "lose precision" according to lint, lseek() calls that
pass "int" seek offsets, and printf() calls that use "%d" instead
of "%ld".  The system here that most needs a "packdisk"ing is
a 286, so that's why I noticed these problems.  After fixing
these sorts of things I had to compile it "large model" so that
the needed storage could be malloc'ed, then tested it out on a
floppy filesystem.  It appeared to work, however, it did not
construct a valid freelist (although fsck fixed this).  This
was under Venix System V/286.

All of these things made me too nervous to trust it on a big
filesystem without a backup.  So testing it further will have to 
wait until I get around to shuffling a zillion floppies.  Of course,
the whole reason for using "packdisk" is to avoid having to do
a backup/restore cycle.

Despite the programs deficiencies in a 16 bit environment,
I found the program well organized and conceived, and even
easy to understand in the absence of comments.

-Rick

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