dawson@utgard.cs.cornell.edu (Dawson Dean) (02/26/91)
My name is Dawson Dean and I wrote AutoSqueeze. Today I learned about a serious bug that can cause potential data loss, and I want to fill people in on what is happening and let you know where to reach me. The bug was well described in an earlier posting, but to quickly recap: 1) If you duplicate a file in a compressed folder, the copy of the file will be truncated. You will not get any warning. This also seems to happen when you copy a compressed file from a compressed folder to another disk. 2) Using compressed files in MPW causes a crash. I have not followed up on this bug because I do not have MPW. For the time being, it is safest to avoid all automatically compressed files in MPW. I will post more when I learn more. I have spoken to somebody with MPW and I will use his machine to get a better idea of the bug. 3) Double clicking an automatically compressed LightSpeed C project file will cause LSC to complain that the file cannot be read. There is not data loss nor is there a crash, but it is a nuiscance. Obviously, the first bug is the most severe. There is a temporary work around: expand files in the finder before using them in MPW or duplicating them in Finder. You may expand files by moving them out of an automatically compressed folder and/or removing the "compressed" suffix from their name. The original poster also forwarded a message to me from somebody else who has had this problem. In the future you may directly contact me by e-mail at: dawson@cs.cornell.edu. I apprectate any and all bug reports and suggestions and I apologize for any inconvenience. I do not have acces to any online boards, but I spoke to another friend and he told me that this bug has been posted to America Online. The important thing now is that this bug be reported so people will not accidently damage their files. At this point, it is too early to know more about the problems. I have replicated the finder copy bug, but I am not sure that the obvious reason for the bug (Finder gets the file size before opening it) is the right one. It sounds reasonable, but I want to trace the code and really find out what is happening. I also cannot give a more specific time table. If you want to be kept up to date, send me e-mail and I will tell you about any major developments. Thanks for your patience, Dawson Dean ****************************************************************** Dawson Dean Internet: dawson@cs.cornell.edu Dept. of Computer Science Office: (607) 255-1179 Cornell University