Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!ncr-sd!greg
From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: "Archive-name:" proposed change
Keywords: multiple part postings
Message-ID: <1220@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 5 Apr 89 16:37:36 GMT
References: <780@usl.usl.edu> <2464@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1187@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <97030@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 51

There seem to be two issues here:  Those of us who wish to conveniently
index and retrieve the packages, and those who wish to conveniently store
the packages.

greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (that's me) proposed something like:
>Archive-name: fun/hangman/V01r01-src/Part01of03

In article <97030@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> page@sun.UUCP (Bob Page) writes:
>I'm not a fan of the 'part X of Y' stuff in the archive name ....

I don't really care if the '... of Y' stuff is in the archive name; my
point was that the terminal component of the name frequently carries too
much semantic weight.  In my example above, Bob might have posted it as
"fun/hangman11src.1" -- that is, the name, version, type, and number are
all squeezed into one component.  (And you can't really tell if it's
version one or eleven...)  What I'm saying is that I'd like to see the
components separated out to make it easy to archive and retrieve.  Whether
it is given as Part03of05 or just Part03 makes little difference here.

Bob does an admirable job in providing the initial categorization (even if
he occasionally puts something in the "langauge" category); I consider the
categorization to be the \hard/ part.  But for those of us that archive and
index these groups, it's not always obvious that "fun/hangman.p1" is a patch
to version 1.1 of the source, while "fun/hangman/V01r01-src/Patch01" is.

>I've had ... requests to limit my archive names to seven unique characters,
>so folks could archive the postings as 'pgmname.CPIO.Z' and still fit in 14
>characters (the current SystemV limit).  ....

(Aside: I'm one of those people using SysV; I'd certainly like to keep the
pathname \components/ under fourteen characters -- that's an intentional
side-effect of my suggestion.)

I think this is a valid point, but it's a different problem.  Perhaps this
could be met by dividing the archive-name into two pieces: One to identify
the \package/ and the other one to identify the \component/.  That is,
"Archive-name: fun/hangman V01r02-src/Part01" would work if the pieces were
separated by white space.  Then those who wish to sort their indexes so
that source, binary, and patches of one version are kept together can do
it, while those who wish to keep compressed cpio archives can strip off
the leading pathname components of the first piece and store it under
"hangman.CPIO.Z".

This is a serious proposal.  Right now, I have to duplicate some of Bob's
work (determining the version and part) before I can archive and index
the articles; it's amazing how much effort that can be sometimes.  (Although
having to do that really makes one respect just how much work the moderators
put in to have a smoothly-running news group.  It's not at all surprising
that they will sometimes make a mistake and have a 'Part 10 of 9' posting!)
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo   Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM  or  greg@ncr-sd