🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.sources.misc thomas%randvax.UUCP@usc.edu (Susan Thomas) writes:

>Archive-name: greedy/part01

>(I'm posting this for a friend)

>This is a awk implementation of the "greedy" bin-packing algorithm 
>as applied to the problem of spreading a set of files over a set 
>of floppies in such a way as to require the least number of
>floppies.  It takes a list of files and generates copying scripts
>which embody the optimal allocation of files.

>Greedy is not the optimal algorithm.  It's just a easily implemented
>heuristic.

If in fact this works well, it would be nice if someone adapted it
into a version of shar to pack the pieces of a shar into the fewest,
say 60Kbyte, articles possible, to save header and archive bytes.
Diskettes aren't the only place where efficient packing is useful! 

[For shars of directory trees, this would require a smarter shar, that
created all needed directories first, and handed
current-directory-relative file pathnames to sed rather than doing a cd
to the directory, and it would force one to unpack at least the first
part of a multipart shar before the other parts. Is this too much of a
sacrifice? Of course, for a shar of one flat directory, there would be
nothing given away, just gain.]

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>