🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec17.031048.20796@samba.oit.unc.edu>, jem@sunSITE (Jonathan Magid) writes:
>Would you believe that I have already done this?  the INDEX file in
>sunsite.unc.edu's mirror of prep (/pub/gnu) contains what you are looking
>for. In a couple of cases, its a few decimal places behind in version
>number (I wrote it a couple of months ago and haven't updated it since).

Great!  At nic.funet.fi, we also had some feedback that the GNU
software distribution is not documented very well, this will help at
least some.  Nic.funet.fi has plans to develop some information
services about available software and perhaps indexes and cataloging
GNU software will be part of it.

The file from sunsite is now also on pub/gnu/INDEX at nic.funet.fi.
Also, at otax.tky.hut.fi there's a gopher server with some pointers to
GNU software and information - gopher is an internet information
service available from boomboc.micro.umn.edu and once you've installed
gopher, you can access the otax GNU directory with

gopher -p English/Topics otax.tky.hut.fi

and then selecting GNU from the menu.  Please however note the README
file on the directory:

"This machine (otax.tky.hut.fi) is an old Sun 3/60 owned by HUT student
body with 8629 accounts on it at the time I'm writing this
and it's got a high load especially in the daytime (time
zone is GMT+2h or GMT+3h in the summer, you can get GMT time on
most Unix systems with "date -u") and the gopher ftp gateway is
implemented so that the stuff is ftp'd to otax and then gopher'd
to you so please don't put too heavy load on this machine 
by ftp'ing megabytes of GNU software via the otax.tky.hut.fi gopher
server, especially at daytime.  Instead you can ftp directly from nic.funet.fi,
prep.ai.mit.edu or any of the other ftp servers 
(see GNU info files/FTP for a list of sites carrying GNU software).

The GNU subtree of this gopher server will probably move to gopher.funet.fi
(which is currently the same machine as nic.funet.fi) in the future, and
this directory will change into a link there."

Ideas for how to organize the software distribution for easy access
via gopher are welcome.  Currently it's just some pointers to the ftp
archives and the abovementioned INDEX file, but some menus like
"Software development tools", "GNU Bulletins", "Editors" and so on and
putting the README files from the packages as well as pointers to the
actual software there would make browsing the archives easier for
people who can't recite the list of GNU packages by heart.

(followups directed to gnu.misc.discuss)

//Jyrki