[TUHS] Reorganising the Unix Archive?

[wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey)]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 07:40:16PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>    Sounds good, although I might offer one slight twist.  I think
>    organizations should be the higher bit not systems, doc etc....

I'll disagree, mainly because of what we have currently in terms of
applications and documentation.

At present, in these categories we have:
 - Circuit_Design	   Festoon   Portable_CC  Shoppa_Tapes	  Usenix_77
   Early_C_Compilers  Macro-11  README	  Software_Tools	  Algol68
   Em_Editor	   OpenLook  Ritter_Vi	  Spencer_Tapes
 - AUUGN  Books  Emails  OralHistory  PUPS  Papers  TUHS  Unix_Review
 - various system setup docs

Except for the last category, all the existing applications and documentation
are not easily classifiable into <organisation>. So I think it would be
better to have a generic top-level Applications and Documentation directories.
We can move the system setup docs into specific system areas.

I don't mind having <organisation> top-level directories, but I fear that
in the long term there will be lots of them. So it's a question: do we clutter
up the top level with a heap of <organisation> directories, or do we
have a heap of Systems/<organisation> directories. I'd prefer the latter.

>    I also feel that Year of Distribution probably needs to be in the
>    name if possible (certainly in metadata or at least an explanatory
>    README).  For things like the USENIX tapes that's easier - because they
>    were done by year.

My preference is to keep date details in metadata and not in directory names.
There will be some things which are hard to date or whose date is in dispute,
and there may be things which are aggregates of work done over several years.

But I'll admit that there is not enough metadata and little consistency in
the metadata (e.g. Readme files) that are currently in the Archive.

Cheers & thanks for the feedback, Warren