ttr1415@helios.TAMU.EDU (Thom Robertson) (06/03/91)
I'm a regular customer at ab20.larc.nasa.gov and other fine Amiga FTP sites. Using these sites is a great privilege, but I have a small gripe that would be simple to rectify. When I look in the incoming directories of these sites, I see a mish-mash jumble of files, most of which have confusing names and/or no accompanying doc file telling the world what the compressed file is all about. This state of higglty-pigglty is also true of some of the non-incoming directories. (Though this is not so true of ab20, of which I can not say enough praise). Anyway, if everybody (or even most everybody) who uploads stuff to these sites were to follow a common format, we would all be happier AND the guys who maintain these sites would thank us. I would like to propose the following standards for submitting material to an FTP site: 1. Always send a seperate, very small, uncompressed, vanilla ASCII text file which succinctly describes the contents of the archive. Name this file whith exactly the same name as the archive, except for the suffix, which should always be ".readme". Remember, no capital letters, for us Unix guys. This would make desisions about what to download and what not to, much easier. In ideal situations, one could get on the site, and type mget *.readme and be rewarded by short descriptions of every available archive. 2. Always archive. Everybody does this anyway, but I thought it bore saying. 3. Always archive a DIRECTORY. This way, when a person downloads your stuff, and de-compresses it using the "consider extended filenames" option, your archive will create it's own directory. As a guy who has done a lot of mass downloads, I can say that this is very handy. My suggestions are put on this public forum for a reason. I want to hash this out; I can't be the only one who has an opinion :) Thanx, Thom Robertson