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FTP archives for papers: database & mirroring



		FTP sites - directory & mirroring

Charles Wells asked on the "categories" list whether anyone has a list
of ftp sites containing category theory papers, and offered to maintain one.

It is possible to do better than this, and "mirror" the files,
ie copy them automatically.  Lee McLoughlin, who maintains an archive
of general software in my department, SRC.doc.ic.ac.uk has written
a program to do this, available as /packages/mirror/mirror.shar from there.

[Please note that this is NOT the same archive as contains papers by
my colleagues in the Theory & Formal Methods section and my TeX macros:
that is THEORY.doc.ic.ac.uk]

All that is needed is to collect the relevant information in an appropriate
form.  I suggest that this is also a good place to keep address information
in a machine readable format.  My entry in this database reads:

package=TaylorP
        comment=Papers by Paul Taylor at Imperial
        site=theory.doc.ic.ac.uk
        remote_dir=/theory/papers/Taylor
        local_dir=TaylorP
        # email=<pt@doc.ic.ac.uk>
        # phone=+44 71 589 5111 x 5057
        # fax=+44 71 581 8024
        # address=Dept of Computing, Imperial College, London SW7 2BZ, UK

I have compiled the database for the people whose papers are in our archive
(not all of them are at Imperial), in the file /theory/papers/mirror-file
in the theory archive.  This file forms part of the configuration
data needed by mirror; other sites should provide similar files.

It would be possible, I suppose, for me to extract this information for
other sites by searching my "categories" and "types" mail from past years
and exploring the various ftp archives, but I consider this is something
that sites should do for themselves.

So, if you use an ftp archive for your papers, please compile an entry
in the above format, and put it together with the other files for the
users of the same archive in an appropriate place. Then mail me either
the file itself or a pointer to it in the archive. I will then keep these
files in the directory /theory/FTP-sites on my archive, for general use,
as well as using them to mirror your files on a weekly basis.

                        B U T

This will only work if people are organised about the maintainance of their
archives.  In particular, there should be one directory(-tree) per person.
Don't mix files by several authors in the same directory.

This will be a very useful resource if we just put in a little bit of
work to set it up.

Paul Taylor