🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <632@mitech.com> gjc@mitech.com writes:
> Hmm. Looks like an automatic way of producing this stuff is an idea
> who's time has come. There are hundreds of people who announce materials 
> available for anonymous FTP. If there were an easy-to-use standard form for 
> them to fill out on-line, I'm sure sure it could be popularized quite
> quickly. 
> 
> In fact, a good standard form would help some people to decide to announce
> something that they have been sitting on. 

Just to add my 2 cents to this.... I'm afraid that my experience with the
majority of site administrators over the past 7 months or so in running
archie has shown me a couple of things:

(a) The anonymous directory is usually maintained by one of the sysadmins
of the facility on his/her own time and on their own volition. I was a
sysadmin for long enough to understand that the maintenance gets done
when other matters are not pressing... ie, seldom.

(b) Often there is no commitment from "management" to the archive. This
is especially true of educational institutions where the archive is
tolerated as a pet project of the sysadmin mentioned above. If this
person leaves, the archive can very rapidly fall into disrepair. This is
less true of commercial organizations where the archived software tends
to be directly related to the corporate projects. The management level of
some facilities don't even realize that they are running an archive.

People have suggested to me in the past that we write a program that
would run on archive hosts which would inform archie when the
configuration of the site had changed (files added/deleted/moved around).
I usually relate the story of the "arbitron" program to them (for those
whoe remember that :-). It's 4PM. Do you know where your arbitron is ?
In other words the program would probably be installed and then
forgotten.

I'm afraid that archive based information is going to be spotty at best
(considering there are over 1000 archive sites now worldwide).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Emtage,                    "Ashore it's wine, women and song;
McGill University,CANADA         Abord it's rum, bum and concertina"
					-19th Century British Naval Saying