swatt@ittvax.UUCP (Alan S. Watt) (07/14/83)
I don't know what other people do, but I save everything that comes
through "net.sources". When non-source material comes through I have
to weed it out pretty much by hand to keep the archive in usable condition.
Several things make this a tedious chore:
1) Discussions. I know netnews software tends to promote this; I
urge people to either use mail or post in "net.wanted", or perhaps
we can create another newsgroup (groan).
2) Umpteen postings of something. If you are distributing stuff that
has not been tested at all, send it first by mail to some
people willing to help you polish it. By the time something
gets posted to the entire net, it should be well shaken-down.
Please don't keep posting stuff because "oops, one more bug fix
for 'xyzzy.c'".
Also, don't re-post stuff because "... posted about 6 months
ago; dunno if people still have it ...". Assume that people
arrange to save stuff they want, and will ask you if they
haven't saved something they need.
If you're posting version 2 of something, it would be nice if
you could include information about when version 1 was posted,
so people could go back and delete the earlier versions.
3) For postings of moderate size (say < 30K bytes), it is a real
convenience if the various files are archived into a single
posting. I really cannot believe all the garbage I have seen
about " ... !FUNKY!STUFF!" and "... fixes to version 3 of shell
archiver ...". If you don't have a simple, reliable shell
archiver, mail me and I will send you one that works every time.
4) For multi-file postings, the convention "file 1 of 4 ..." is
real handy.
I have been saving stuff since August of 82. In case you're curious, that
amounts to 11 megabytes after all the cruft is weeded out, and duplicates
and obsolete versions eliminated; I just had to archive it all to tape
because we were flat out of disk space.
- Alan S. Watt
{decvax,duke,lbl-csam,purdue,psuvax,yale-comix}!ittvax!swattptw@vaxine.UUCP (P. Tucker Withington) (07/14/83)
Here, here. But I suspect you will have to post your sentiments regularly to net.sources to remind people that non-source material does not go there. --Tucker (ptw@vaxine.UUCP)