🚀 go-pugleaf

kris@microware.com (Kris Hoffmeyer) writes:

>I don't understand how stacker does not have slack space...
>Stacker does allow you to set the file block size, but it installs
>at 8K blocks, right?  So if a file or it's last block is less than
>8K, the rest is "slack", isn't it?

It's true that DOS will not use this space, but Stacker is not DOS.
Stacker will store other data in the unused space.  This is a major way
that Stacker achieves its data compression.

The STACVOL file used by Stacker has 512-byte clusters internally.
Stacker tells DOS that it uses 8K clusters, but inside, where you can't
see, it uses 512-byte clusters.  DOS has the wrong idea about what is
actually going on in its clusters.

This raises the point that if a program expects to write data beyond the
EOF for a file (some virus protectors might do this), then these
programs will not work with Stacker.  Has anyone seen this behavior?

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