willis@violet.berkeley.edu (Willis Johnson) (04/02/88)
Serious Clipper bugs! There are currently at least two serious bugs in the Summer '87 version of Clipper which can corrupt the FAT on your hard disk. 1) If your application runs on a machine with extended memory, the load module may over-write the FAT in RAM. Nantucket claims that you can avoid this problem by setting a DOS environment variable "clipper=E000" before running the exe file. They note that setting this variable within the file before you compile it *is not sufficient to solve the problem*. 2) The FAT may also get zapped if you run an application compiled with Clipper on a system that has a disk cache in operation. Nantucket also confirms that if you use an unindexed .dbf file greater than 64k, one record per 64k will become corrupt. They suggest that you create a trivial index for such files. I had to spend a lot of time collecting this information because the people at Nantucket have been irresponsibly reticent about owning up to their mistakes. I heard of one guy who had to recall a whole shipment of compiled applications. I called Nantucket and told them that I expect better service in the future and suggest that other Clipper users do the same. Willis Johnson willis@violet.BERKELEY.EDU