sherwood@space.UAlberta.CA (Sherwood Botsford) (03/29/91)
In article <1991Mar27.131513.486@arizona.edu> zazula@uazhe0.physics.arizona.edu writes: > >Being new to Unix, I'm not sure what all of these programs bearing clever >names such as elk, flex, bison, etc... really are. Would it be possible >for people to put in a brief explanation of the programs in along with >the posting announcing it's availability? This would save me from downloading >every new thing I see in /pub/next/2.0-release/sources. A retroactive >listing placed along with the files in this and the 1.0-release directories >would be nice but probably too much to ask. > I'd like to see things go a step further. If uploaders could upload 2 files. One a compressed tar of the package, the other a 1 screen (80 char x 24 lines) description of what the program does. The name of this file should be filename.desc where the original is filename.tar.Z If this convention were followed, a person could do an ftp mget *.desc and get the short descriptions of the programs quickly, and save a lot of useless packets. This file could be included when someone announces over the net that a revision to such & such is available. Depending on how much work the administrators of the archive sites are, we wouldn't need to send the .desc file separately. If the site were set up so that all incomming tar.Z files were scanned for the .desc file, and it was extracted... At any rate, the .desc file should be included in the tar.Z sherwood botsford U of A Edmonton Alberta