K312240@AEARN.BITNET (Klaus Kusche) (11/26/90)
Dear Mailing List! About distributing the Occam for Unix compiler: The one who distributed those files just complained that these files suffered from unreliable transfer and that he will resend them. **** Please do not do so!!! **** They will again be lost, and for good reason: Many mail systems and gateways set up a hard limit on the number of lines or chars a mail may contain at most. The strictest limit I'm aware of is 3000 lines. Any mail message containing more than this will silently be discarded. The reasons for doing so are: 1.) Many netters (especially on the transputer mailing list with lots of commercial subscribers) have to pay for their lines on a per- volume basis. You will cost them a lot of money, even if they are not interested (even if you do not cost money, you waste line bandwidth, which is very critical in Europe. I estimate that your first posting kept the transatlantic line busy for several hours!) 2.) Many netters are not prepared to receive such large files. They may cause all kinds of troubes (also, even some gateways easily hang when flooded with mail, X400 gateways for example are usually very small MicroVAXes and will send nastygrams about "MTA congestion" or something similar). In our case, we have some students on the transputer list. They have very little disk space allowed. As "mail" is part of their login routine, and as "mail" was unable to put the incoming mail onto their disk (which is necessary also for just deleting the mail), they were effectively locked out of their userids, requiring external help. To help solving the problem, I will try to put the files onto an automatic file server. Anybody may request them from there then. I will inform you when I succeeded (there are some bureaucratic issues to solve first). Greetings ************************************************************************ * Klaus Kusche * * Research Institute for Symbolic Computation * * Johannes Kepler University Tel: +43 7236 3231 67 * * A-4040 Linz Telex: (Austria) 22323 uni li a * * Austria (Europe) Fax: +43 7236 3338 30 * * * * Bitnet: K312240@AEARN * * Arpa/CS/Internet: K312240%AEARN.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU * * UUCP: mcsun!aearn.bitnet!K312240 * * Janet: k312240@earn.aearn or k312240%aearn@earn-relay * ************************************************************************