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From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.archives
Subject: Re: Comp.archives database format
Message-ID: <8797@spl1.UUCP>
Date: 1 Nov 88 02:13:20 GMT
References: <116@twwells.uucp> <275@edg1.UUCP>
Sender: news@spl1.UUCP
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 36
Approved: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)

In article <275@edg1.UUCP> grumpy@edg1 (Eric Schwarz) writes:
: Is there a reason why you are using different field delimiters for
: the 3 database entry formats?  The site entry uses colons, the
: information entry uses commas (with colon sub-field delimiters), and
: the content entry uses semi-colons.

No, other than carelessness. I am changing the format so that
semicolons are the field delimiter, commas are the smallest subfield
delimiter, and colons are the intermediate field delimiter.

: The site entry contains a path to the archive files, what about
: archives that have multiple archive directories?  You need to know
: which files are in which directories.  Is putting this information
: in the content entry going to make it too big (I don't know how
: many content entries there will be eventually)?

This one reason why there can be more than one CO line. Suppose that
I had stuff in directories /archive/foo and /archive/bar; I could
then have two CO lines:

	CO foo.uucp;uucp;/archive/foo;...
	CO bar.uucp;uucp;/archive/bar;...

In the content database, things in /archive/foo would have lines like:

	prog;vers;mysite;foo*;foo-file;...

and things in /archive/bar would have lines like:

	prog;vers;mysite;bar*;bar-file;...

This also makes it easy to tell everyone that the path has changed:
all you do is resubmit the site entry.

---
Bill
{uunet|novavax}!proxftl!twwells!bill