Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Automatic archive discovery, take 1

[Colin Walters]

On Sat, 2003-12-13 at 23:43, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> Here's a rough-but-functional, lightweight archive discovery
> system.

I think this is a very cool idea.  It makes me think that what we should
actually be registering is something like "address@hidden", not
"address@hidden".

So if register-archive is passed just something like
address@hidden (i.e. no --), then it registers it as a
"meta-archive".

Archives would then become subdirectories of the meta-archive.  So
rotating your archives doesn't require everyone to register them; you
simply create a new directory, and things just start working.

The disadvantage is that you then couldn't have multiple archives with
the same prefix mapping to two totally different URLs.  But does anyone
really do this?  For people who wanted to, you could add a suffix to
your email address to distinguish the two, like address@hidden,
address@hidden  


Thinking about this a little more, how about we call the meta-archives
above "repositories".  A repository can hold a number of archives.  A
repository has a single file =REPOSITORY at the toplevel which contains
an RFC-822 formatted file encoded in UTF-8.  An example might be:

Creation-date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 15:17:29 -0500
Description: Colin's Debian packages
Notes: freeform text goes here
 may be continued on to the next line

We then add a tla command, "make-repository", which would create the
=REPOSITORY file, perhaps prompting for a description and stuff.  Then
various other tla commands like 'make-archive' would be enhanced to be
repository-aware.

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