Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!xanth!nic.MR.NET!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: "Archive-name:" proposed change Message-ID: <13558@ncoast.ORG> Date: 12 Apr 89 02:07:56 GMT References: <780@usl.usl.edu> <2464@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1187@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <97030@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1220@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.sources.d Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 72 As quoted from <1220@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> by greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel): +--------------- | >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.) +--------------- Side comment: I try to keep my archive names to a maximum of 10 characters; I also save compressed cpio's of some things. My convention is to use the extension ".cZ".... +--------------- | 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!) +--------------- At least once, I've received a "part 5 of 4" from the *author* of a package. I'm trying to come up with some kind of convention to make archive names more useful myself. My conventions go a bit farther than these; and I'm still contemplating moving parts elsewhere. Example: For about a month, Archive-names in comp.sources.misc included a compatability section (and I have continued this in certain cases); this consists of something like ".bsd" or ".s5" (or ".xenix" or ".uport", etc.) appended to the archive name. I've since decided that this belongs in a standardized Keywords: line, and I'll probably add this feature for Volume 7 if I have enough time to work on it. (I will include a comprehensive dictionary of keywords in the Welcome! posting when I implement this. By standardizing the contents of the Keywords: line, you can use it to generate an index to find only, say, System V-compatable sources. Thought: extend the auxiliary headers as follows: Submitted-by: ... Posting-number: ... Archive-name: foobar/Part01 Archive-version: 1.0 Archive-keywords: C, K&R, SunOS4, NeWS, binary Warnings: contains uuencoded, compressed bitmaps and possibly, Moderator: ... to make it easy to identify postings by a sub-moderator (although this may not be necessary or even desireable; it's just a thought). Note that the Archive-keywords: line includes information about the language required; there have been times when I've FTP'd something large only to discover that it requires ANSI C (ncoast, being System III, has neither an ANSI C nor the ability to run GCC -- at least, not without a massive rewrite and a guarantee of thrashing the system while it's running...). This also handles the occasional Ada or Pascal source (and I seem to remember at least one posting in CLU!). The list above isn't necessarily definitive. Suggestions, anyone? ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc allbery@ncoast.org uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@ NCoast Public Access UN*X - (216) 781-6201, 300/1200/2400 baud, login: makeuser