Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!ig!rutgers!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: Better ways of distributing GenBank
Message-ID: <3142@phri.UUCP>
Date: 12 Feb 88 20:38:03 GMT
Distribution: bionet
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, NYC, NY
Lines: 25


	I've got a suggestion for the distribution of GenBank (and other
related databases).  Instead of just mailing out a tape 4 times a year with
the complete data base on it, why not allow sites to ftp weekly updates?
I'm not sure exactly what format the updates should be in (being a Unix
person, I'd vote for "diff -c" output, but that probably wouldn't be so
great for the VMS, TOPS-20, VM, PC-DOS, etc folks).

	The obvious advantages over the current method would be faster
updates, reduced magtape and postage costs, and less manual operator
intervention (instead of somebody having to mount a tape, we'd just fire up
a crontab deamon in the wee hours of sunday morning).  I suppose there
might be offsetting disadvantages: the possibility of getting out of sync
with the master data base if you just keep applying incremental diffs to a
single archival starting point and increased network traffic.  I'm sure
there are both advantages and disadvantages that I havn't yet thought of.

	What do other people think of this?  I suppose the best thing would
be to upgrade the entire Internet to ethernet-type bandwidth and then we
could all just put "ig.com:/usr/database /usr/database nfs ro" in our
/etc/fstab files, but that might not be practical (yet).
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016