🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <78738@netnews.upenn.edu> yee@mipgsun.mipg.upenn.edu (Conway Yee) writes:
>>Conway> When I wrote that RCS will not work with ftp, I meant that it is a ftp
>>Conway> user can not ftp gcc version 1.15 (or some such) directly from the gcc
>>Conway> RCS source tree.  Isn't this the case?
>>
>>What you could do is set up an E-mail server which would get things
>>for you. For instance:
>>
>>The message:
>>From user@host Wed Feb 30 00:00:00 1999
>>Subject: send program:gcc version:2.0
>>
>>the response:
>>cd /tmp
>>setenv CVSROOT /where/it/lives
>>cvs co -Q -r V2_0 gcc
>>tar cvzf - gcc | uuencode gcc-2.0.tar.Z | mail -s gcc-2.0 user@host
>>cvs release -Q -d gcc
>>
>>You might want to split the mail ;-)
>
>Using a mail server to get at the files you need is much less
>desirable than ftp.  This is why people with access to both rarely, if
>ever, use mail servers. 
>
>Assuming what I think about ftp and rcs is true, this wouldn't fly.
>I, for one, like the convenience of ftp.  In order for an archive to
>work well on the net, it must be accessible by ftp.  To restrict
>access to an archive by using a mail server just so that the archive
>can use rcs would cause the archive to sink into obscurity.  In the
>case of prep, it would go a long way to hurt the cause of free
>software.
[...]

Excuse my ignorance about ftp -- I've never had decent access to it --
but you mean the output of a remote pipeline (I'm assuming there's a unix on
the remote end) can't be hooked up to the input of, say, the "get" command?

I have a old man page for ftp laying around that indicates that "-" can
be used for a filename, and indicates that get is supposed to read the
standard input on the remote end.  The man page doesn't say how said
standard input is to be specified, but I would guess that in the spirit of
the unix philosophy, there must be a way, possibly including pipelines.

Just in case anybody is wondering, the relevance of this to GNU is that
we are discussing ways and means of conserving space on GNU's ftp servers.
Can the space-conservation capabilities of RCS (via file deltas) and the
configuration management capabilities of CVS be effectively melded
with the remote-access capabilities of ftp?  Shouldn't be hard for a
buncha net-wizards :) ...

In my original posting I certainly did not have in mind ftp'ing a whole RCS
tree.

kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)