jac@paul.rutgers.edu (Jonathan A. Chandross) (09/06/90)
Submitted-by: jac
Posting-number: Volume 1, Administrivia: 7
From: timothy l meekins <meekins@cis.ohio-state.edu>
What we cannot forget when archiving source, is to allow a hierarchical
file structure. For instance, I recently released the source code to a
graphics demo I wrote. This source code *had* to be placed within separate
subdirectories, and at the same time be archived all together. The Source
Code Sampler from Apple also uses directory nesting. How about something
similar to Apple-Single, but with 7-bit bytes.
I would also suggest that in *all* postings that the program version number
be given. Some programs have many versions floating around, and many
archive sites simply don't use the version numbers, thus requiring one to
download and unpack the entire program to see if it's a new version or an
older version.
[This is a good point, but there is a problem with it.
How are files stored? Normally, you'd have something like:
games/aliens/aliens.part1
...
games/aliens/aliens.part6
Using a scheme like:
games/aliens.v1.0/aliens.part1
...
games/aliens.v1.0/aliens.part6
would work, but only for simple version numbers. Some people use
version numbers like "V.1.23014". Pretty soon, your names are
full of this instead of what the archive *is* (remember, 14
character limit on names.)
So we move to using the version number as a directory name:
games/aliens/v1.0/aliens.part1
...
games/aliens/v1.0/aliens.part6
That works, but is likely to complicate things a bit if the program
is not expected to change.
If we adopt Larry Virden's suggestion (+) of categorizing by machine,
we'd end up with archive names like:
games/apple2e/aliens/v1.0/aliens.part1
...
games/apple2e/aliens/v1.0/aliens.part6
This doesn't actually look so bad, but it is a bit verbose.
There are clearly three options here:
(1) declare this to be an archiving problem and let people take it
up with the maintainer of the archive. (Perhaps each archive
should have a file containing version numbers for each release.)
(2) use the above scheme
(3) use something else
(+) the more I think about it the more I like this. Classifying
according to machine should reduce the liklihood of downloading
something only to discover that it works on a machine you don't
own.
]
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Jonathan A. Chandross
Internet: jac@paul.rutgers.edu
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