multipart objects - directories

[Markus Stumpf <[e-mail]>]

Me again ;)

I ran over two other problems:

Some "Template-Type: SOFTWARE" e.g. comes in more than one part, like e.g.
   some.gz.aa
   some.gz.ab
   some.gz.ac
   [ ... ]
How would you describe this with the methods given in the current draft?
One template for each of the parts? This is kinda ugly and hard to maintain.
But I couldn't find any provisions for such multipart objects.

The other problem is with providing information about directories.
Assume a directory named /pub/comp/security. The directory should contain
security related information regarding the computer area.
IMHO it would be useful to have a AFA-OBJECT called DIRECTORY to describe
the contents of a directory.
This would be extremely useful in the beginning of IAFAising FTP archives,
as it is much easier and much less work to write one template describing
a directory than 100 to describe each file in this directory.

OFF TOPIC:
It would REALLY be nice to have some more traffic on the list or some
more information about what's going on. All I found as comments to the
latest draft was Martijns and mine.
No more interest from the others? Or are you all reporting to Alan
or Peter directly? In this case it would be nice to have some regularly
information about what's going on.

We have now more than 1900 AFA templates for our FTP archive and we
assume some local standards on things that are still somewhat unclear.
Some folks are writing scripts to handle AFA templates to create e.g.
databases and HTML files. Some things like the Location:, Host:, Port:,
.... thingy are still rather unhandy!
I have always urged folks here to write IAFA templates and so did
Martijn with ALIWEB. But the more templates we have the harder it
will become to convert them to a newer and better working standard.
And at the end we will have more and more different versions of 
templates according to the various drafts and the main work will not
be collecting and index them but converting them to some common base.

PLEASE !!! We are near to the end of the project, let's finnish it!

	\Maex
-- 
______________________________________________________________________________
 Markus Stumpf                        [e-mail] 
                                http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~stumpf/