[comp.emacs] Uncompress

howard@CHEETA.ISI.EDU (Bryan Howard) (03/09/88)

I have been trying to get the latest GNU Emacs distribution (18.50).
It is available from prep.ai.mit.edu in compressed tar format.
I FTPed the file using binary format into my directory on venera.
When I tried to unpack it (zcat edist.tar-18.50.Z | tar tf -) I got
the following error:

...
dist-18.50/info/gdb-1
dist-18.50/info/gdb-2
tar: directory checksum error (3823 != 44600)
%

I tried this on venera.isi.edu (4.3bsd Unix), nova.isi.edu (sun 4.2 Rel 3.4,
sun2), action.isi.edu (sun 4.2 Rel 3.4, sun3), and vlsif.isi.edu (Ultrix
2.0).  Same results everywhere.

I posted a question to info-gnu-emacs and several poeple told me they
had no problems; did I use binary mode.  A few responses expressed
agreement with my problem.

Do I have a problem here with uncompress or tar?  I suspect that since
several other people had no problems, it's probably not the file itself.
But I'm not sure.

Bryan D. Howard						Howard @ ISI.Edu
USC/Information Sciences Institute
In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings...

bob@ALLOSAUR.CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Bob Sutterfield) (03/10/88)

For the past week-and-a-half, people have had problems getting stuff
off hosts at MIT.  The most common symptom seems to be that in getting
512,000 byte chunks of X.V11R2, the first byte of the last packet of
the transfer doesn't make it, leaving the aspiring FTP-getter with
511,999 bytes.  Another popular problem is to get the correct number
of bytes, but for the checksum to come out wrong.

People all over the place with several sorts of machines have observed
this problem with expo.lcs.mit.edu, and we may be seeing a similar
problem with prep.ai.mit.edu now, too.  I haven't heard any good
suggestions yet, except to just keep trying until you get a good copy.
Sigh...
------
 Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science
 The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
 bob@cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!cbosgd!osu-cis!bob

charles@hpcvca.HP.COM (Charles Brown) (03/10/88)

>Do I have a problem here with uncompress or tar?  I suspect that since
>several other people had no problems, it's probably not the file itself.
>	Bryan D. Howard		Howard @ ISI.Edu

Try to recompress the file after uncompressing it.  If the result is
the same as the original, then the problem is probably not in compress.

Look at the file after uncompressing it.  Does it look OK?  Especially
check that the end is not truncated.  For the most part, tar files are
readable with a good editor such as emacs.  :-)

The problem may be with the FTP connection.  There seem to be some
incompatible versions of ftp around.
	charles@hp-pcd