eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene Miya) (03/13/89)
I have been informed by one of our system admins that we are shortly facing a disk crunch on the host which I keep my bibliography. Currently, the bibliography is a single giant (4 MB) ASCII file. This is not how I maintain or search for it myself. I have kept it ASCII because many sites which ask for it are not Unix sites: VMS, IBM (EBCDIC let the protocol do the coversion), etc. I've done data compression tests in the past using Unix compress and pack, but I want to forewarn all non-Unix sites that the day will come when I will have to resort to data compression and the afforementioned tools might be considered Unix source code. It will be up to users in the non-Unix communities to write their own filters to uncompress or unpack my bibliography. The TeX people have provided conversion filters for refer to bibtex (I'm glad I didn't select this larger format). Neither have I provided anything like lookbib or roffbib (search or format) (still editing a 4 MB file to search for interesting entries must be interesting on VM systems ;-). [And I know those programs are regarded as source code.] So this is a warning to prepare by either writing conversion filter equivalents or think about getting access to a 4.2/4.3 BSD based system. --eugene miya MP/DP biblio maintainer (in suspended animation)