CD-rom > TK50?

[JIW2 at psuvm.psu.edu]

 Here's a problem I've been working on for quite a while, with no
success:  Does anyone know how to produce setld-installable TK50's
from the files on a CD-rom?  We are an ESL site, and one of our
jobs is to distribute setld-installable TK50 tapes of Ultrix
products to our clients.  Up to now, we have received our
software distribution on TK50 tapes.  We would like to go to the
DEC Ultrix CD-rom consolidated distribution when it becomes
available (soon, we're told), but if we were to do so, we would
(as things stand now) have no way to produce TK50's that can be
installed with setld.  I wrote a shell script that will >duplicate<
setld-installable TK50's, but have so far had no success in coming up
with something that will take the setld-installable files on a
CD-rom and make a setld-installable tape from them.

 I put a call in to the Atlanta support center about two months
ago, outlining this problem.  They told us that several other
educational sites had contacted them with the same problem, and
they had no answers to give -- no one knew how this could be done.

 Before anyone jumps to the seemingly obvious answers here, read on:

1: Simply tarring the files from CD-rom to TK50 is NOT the
   answer, as the resultant TK50 is not setld-installable.
   One must tar the files from the tape to disk, then install
   from disk.  Many of our clients don't have the disk space to
   do this.  And many who are new to Ultrix/Unix are confused
   by the extra step; they want to be able to install the product
   exactly the way it says to do so in the installation manual.

2: Yes, I know there is a section of the Ultrix documentation
   called "Guide to Preparing Software for Disribution on
   ULTRIX Systems."  However, it does not address our problem.
   This manual is concerned with creating your own setld-
   compatible kits from scratch, and does not deal at all with
   any method for creating setld-compatible TK50's from CD-rom.

3: We cannot ask all of our clients to buy CD-rom drives.  Even
   if by some unimaginable windfall, the University somehow came
   up with enough money to buy CD-rom drives for everybody, we
   still would have only one master CD-rom, which we could not
   simply pass around.

 The files on the CD-rom are, as far as I am able to tell,
identical to what one gets on disk by doing setld -x /dev/rmt0h
against a setld-compatible tape.  What we need, in effect, is
a sort of a "reverse" setld -x, that would take the installable
disk files and create a structured setld distribution onto a tape.
None of the files on /usr/sys/dist seem capable of doing this, and
Atlanta has so far come up with nothing.  Help!  Has anyone else out
there faced this problem?  Any suggestions along these lines would be
useful, both for us and for other ESL Ultrix sites who would like
to go to CD-rom consolidated distribution.   Thanks in advance.

                                          John Wagner

                                    Pennsylvania State University