From: umueller@iiic.ethz.ch (Urban Dominik Mueller)
Subject: Re: IS XPK SAFE?
Keywords: semprini, spam, ni, naught bits, Bruce
Organization: Dept. Informatik, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 16:22:42 GMT

In article <1992Nov15.202250.10026@news.uit.no> terjem@stud.cs.uit.no (Terje Normann Marthinussen) writes:
>In article <Bxnwv6.At@javelin.sim.es.com>, dingebre@imp.sim.es.com (David Ingebretsen) writes:
>>
>>I'm very impressed with the XPK package and the XFH and XPK-handler
>>file systems. BUT how reliable are they?
>>
>>If you use/have used either of these, I would appreciate you thoughts.
>>
>I've had som bad experiences with xfh/xpk.

The worst I've ever heard of, to be precise.

>Gnuemacs won't start sometimes in compressed form.

Could be lack of memory. XFH is very mem intensive; the whole file is
decompressed to RAM in order to be able to Seek().

>When compressing then uncompressing some programs there will be errors when you
>uncompress it.

So SEND ME THOSE FILES! Really, we crucially depend on that kind of feedback.
If these help finding a bug in NUKE (or whatever), you may prevent other people
from losing important data!

>When xfh open files it holds the whole file in uncompressed form in memory until
>it's closed again. So, when I tried to compress my cgfonts: directory, I ran out
>memory just by starting PPage (this is documented in the manual though).

Yes. All current solutions work like this, including PPpatch and all 
powerpacker.library applications.

>Disk access will be VERY slow, especially "dir". I suppose this is because 
>xfh will have to examine all the files in the directory for information
>about the compression type and their real size.

Correct, this is unavoidable. Use directory caching programs.

>Some programs destroys their own file upon execution (for instance commodities)
>don't now why. Have wondered maybe it could be that they are trying to write
>to their own file when running? (haven't cared to examine the phenomena closer though.
>It's not that important to me)

Again, send me those files.

>Showdvi/dviprint from the PasTeX package complains about the compressed files
>(don't remember the error though), but they will work.

They have some built in notification which does not seem to work with XFH.

>I have the feeling that Nuke, which I think is the best compression method also
>is the least stable.

Doubt that. NUKE has successfully compressed and decompressed a 100MB 
partition of mine without a single enforcer/mungwall hit. You'll have to
run tests, replacing NUKE by BLZW or NONE. If it still happens, xpkmaster or
XFH is the culprit.

>That's all I can remember right know, but I feel that there probably is
>more. If anyone has some ideas about how to get rid of the above problems then
>they will be  appriciated.

You've got the authors' addresses. We do need feedback and some further tests
from your side or we have no chance of eliminating bugs that don't occur
on our configs. This goes to everyone reading this, of course.

>Terje Marthinussen
>terjem@stud.cs.uit.no

| Urban Dominik Mueller umueller@amiga.physik.unizh.ch   Help! I'm being |
| Schulhausstrasse 83   umueller@iiic.ethz.ch            held prisoner   |
| 6312 Steinhausen      u.mueller@link-ch1.ZER           in a signature  |
| SWITZERLAND           urban mueller@2:302/906 (FIDO)   factory!        |