Re: Naming/Format conventions for INDEX files

[Carsten Rossenhoevel <[e-mail]>]

Hallo,

Eric Anderson writes:
 > Looks pretty nice, it would probably be good to have at the front a
 > type, e.g. l, f, d, etc.  What do you do about devices and things like
 > that?  Also, the fact that permissions aren't there is a problem.  You
 > might want to just define the permissions format.

It doesn't make sense to list device files in an FTP archive index.
However, there was some discussion about a type field.  In my opinion,
the three possible types file, directory and link can be distinguished
without a type field:

    - directory names end with '/'
    - links have ' -> ' in their name
    - all others are plain files

We removed the permissions field assuming that it should always be
'******r--' for files and '******r-x' for directories.  (The first
six characters don't matter at all.)  By convention, writable
directories are labeled 'incoming' to make their mode 'rwx' obvious.

Perhaps, an expression like 
     ( -type f -perm +o+r ) -or ( -type d -perm +o+rx )
should be added to the gfind arguments to enforce the conventions
mentioned above.  If the /dev directories have correct modes we will
get rid of device files that way, too.

 > Unless something has changed in 3.0, archie sites will still have to
 > remove the entire site and re-enter it.  On the other hand, it's not a
 > whole lot of work to do that now, and 3.0 is supposed to make enters
 > go much faster.

We are going to write a small script that converts the new index format
to plain ls-lR for sites using index parsers restricted to that.

CU, Carsten

.........................................................................
Carsten Rossenhoevel                   {cross,gnu,ftpadm}@cs.tu-berlin.de     
                                               {caro,newsmaster}@specs.de