Re: Naming/Format conventions for INDEX files

["Eric A. Anderson" <[e-mail]>]

Carsten Rossenhoevel <[e-mail]> writes:
> 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
Unless I decide to be obnoxious and upload a file with ' -> ' in it's
name.
And having seen some of the names that people use, embedded spaces and
stuff like that, I could see that happening.  Not likely, but possible.
> 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.
Yea, the first six characters don't matter, but people could upload
executables to places, for example for people to bootstrap or
something like that.  Alternately for ease of use.  Furthermore, not
everyone follows the convetion of making writable directories labeled
incoming. 
(Note I'm just pointing these things out so that people can consider
the rammifications.  I already think that the new format is better
than the old format.)
> 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.
You'd miss incoming directories with that. :)
>  > 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.
I'm not convinced it would be completely trivial, you've got to
convert the date format. Also you have to re-arrange the positions of
stuff in the file.  It wouldn't be impossible, but neither would it be
trivial.
          -Eric 
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