Re: filenaming proposal for IAFA description files

[Alan Emtage <[e-mail]>]

Hi Markus,


> Therefor I'd like to propose the ending .iir (IAFA Index Record) for all
> files containing the IAFA description information!
> Any comments?

The name that the IAFA draft suggests for UNIX sites, for this kind of
information is IAFA-PACKAGES. We conciously avoided dotted filename
extensions because of the problem that you mention. Since the document
specifies that you can have more than one record in this file, you don't
have to worry about putting more than one package in a directory.... just
keep adding the descriptions to the file. 

Now, this filename will obviously have to be different for VMS files,
since they require an extension. Not being completely familiar with the
filename restrictions on that (and may of the other OS's), maybe somebody
out there can tell us if it will suffice to keep the names for the UNIX
filenames and just add ".TXT" for VMS ? I defer to the more knowlegable
on this one. The same is true of VM/CMS.

In general, I don't think we'll have a problem with the internals of the
files, with the possible exception of IBM OS's which require 80 column
(or 132 column) records. 

The intention here is _not_ to have the same filename convention for
every Operating System. This would necessarily mean that we'd have to
stick to the lowest common denomenator, and that would be ridiculous. If
we can have a paragraph for the the major Operating Systems in the
document explaining how the scheme is to be implemented there, that will
be fine. Any tool which is retrieving this information will just have to
be smart enough to figure out what's going on. Not nice, but better than
having every file on the Internet stick to the old 6.3 convention.


> >From the goals and Milestones section of the IAFA-charter I see that IAFA
> should become a RFC this November! Is this still up-to-date??

We're a bit behind schedule since the last meeting requested that we
change more things than had been anticipated. We're hoping that after
Washington next month we'll be able to go into Internet Draft and then
RFC (FYI) status.

> Is it to early to send the .iir files back to the authors and ask for their
> support?

Our plan at the moment is to contact the moderators of the USENET source
groups and ask them if they will request that all authors submit an IAFA
file with their data. I would suggest that you wait a little while before
contacting the authors... we need to have a more "final" version of the
templates before we start talking to the individuals.


-- 
-Alan

[phone]