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Date:      22 Apr 2002 17:08:57 -0700
From:      Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@artlogix.com>
To:        Mark Filipak <filipak@earthlink.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Mark asks: Can anyone send me mcopy?
Message-ID:  <87r8l7e0o6.fsf@ralf.artlogix.com>
In-Reply-To: <3CC3CC10.2F50EB0D@earthlink.net>
References:  <3CC19E08.8CA859B0@earthlink.net> <20020422075640.GU27975@roman.mobil.cz> <3CC3CC10.2F50EB0D@earthlink.net>

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Mark Filipak <filipak@earthlink.net> writes:

| I ask someone, anyone, to simply send me mcopy. No one sends me mcopy.
| Instead many people preach at me.
| 
| What is wrong with this picture?

Uh . . . Mark, this *isn't* a professional technical support facility with paid
personnel.  It's a mailing list of volunteers; as such, the responses are going
to be rather less formal than you might expect from, say, a Microsoft Technical
Support Representative ($230 per incident, last I checked).

There's also a matter that people look at your request, and think, "Why does he
need a DOS emulation tool when he really doesn't?  Perhaps he doesn't know
about how to mount, format or write floppies on a Unix system.  I'll tell him
how to do that.  That'll certainly be better than sending him a 130 KiB binary
encoded as a 163 KiB attachment that might not even work on his system.""

The problem with sending you a binary version of mcopy is that it would either
have to be statically linked and able to run on a FreeBSD 3.3 system (and there
aren't many of those left out there), or dynamically linked and sent to you
along with any libraries you don't happen to have.  I could investigate more,
but that's the stock answer.  It's going to be much easier to get mcopy working
on your system under 4.5, after you have ports going, if you need mcopy.  But
under the circumstances, you don't even *need* mcopy to pull off what you want
to do.

I didn't see any "preaching" going on in the message you cited, but perhaps you
were referring to a different message.  Like any list with potential advocacy
going on, sometimes you're going to get a less-than-helpful and sometimes
downright dismissive responses.  Those are best ignored.  (I've gone so far as
to use Gnus [an Emacs-based mail/newsreader] to score people down when they've
been chronic buttheads.)

| Q: Is UNIX the spawn of Satan?

Nah.  Satan's not nearly as cute as Beastie turned out to be.

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