Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rpi.edu!tale From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: Re: Emacs Lisp Archives -- organization Message-ID: Date: 23 Jun 89 22:49:49 GMT References: <8906232104.AA01548@flash.> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu Distribution: gnu Lines: 39 In-reply-to: sdr@flash.alliant.com's message of 23 Jun 89 21:04:06 GMT In <8906232104.AA01548@flash.> sdr@flash.alliant.com (Stephen D. Rogers) writes sdr> It seems like shar archives often come in numbered pieces, and patches sdr> are numbered too. So, you could put the pieces in a `shar' or `patch' sdr> subdirectory. Again, this makes it easier to live with restrictions on sdr> file name length. For example, sdr> mode/sdr1/shell/shar/01 sdr> mode/sdr1/shell/shar/02 sdr> ... sdr> mode/sdr1/shell/shar/10 AcK! Deep directories in anonymous ftp hierarchies are a major pain in the arse. Furthermore, looking at an ls of mode, I am liable to see something like "sdr tale dsill kjones" or some such -- those aren't modes and they really make it more difficult for me to find what I want because I either have to look it up in a table somewhere or go looking through multiple ls' until I find the mode name I am looking for. For most packages (certainly >90%) there is no name conflict at all. For some, like pascal.el and my recently posted irc.el, there is a conflict. These can be resolved by _then_ adding the author name to the package name or by making a (for example) irc directory which would have three packages each identified by author name. And all the shar files should be together on the higher level, nor down another path. If I am looking at mode/perl and I see "shar", the next thing I do is "get shar"; with the proposed "defense in depth" method I get some annoying results because of trying to get a directory. I was the one that first suggested to Dave that .el files have a maximun name length of thirteen characters for SYSVers. It is certainly possible to do this without making the directories so deep. Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet")) "I realize the Internet isn't the whole world, but it is the center of it." -- Greg Woods