[ To avoid messy subject lines, follow-ups only to the Locator-SIG. ]

> It would be nice to keep these rich in hyperlinks, and include links
> for things like "Find other similar software," "Add review comments,"

That reminds me; a useful feature would be symlinks, so that
Graphics/Image Processing/Transforms can have a link to
Math/Matrix/FFT . (It's not obvious whether a link should be
considered a package in its own right, or a branch that happens to
take you somewhere else in the tree. The current display is obviously
influenced by Yahoo, where symlinks can be used in both ways, I
think. Hmm.)

It's not hard to implement displaying of symlinks in some
special way, but what's the Web-based interface for creating them? I
was thinking that in editing mode you could "pick up" the current
directory, and drop it in other directories giving it a name. It
still seems sort of cumbersome to use, though; perhaps if the pickup
was done via a cookie, you could have two Netscape windows open at the
same time and do it that way. Any ideas?

> How about date of archive release? Required software? Compatibility
> information? Mailing list links? Optional "current challenges" list?
> Size of archive. PGP signature key...

Much like the Linux Software Map; see
ftp://ftp.execpc.com/pub/lsm/LSM.README . For things like required
software, one might want to enforce some sort of
machine-understandable format so that dependencies can be computed
automatically. (Imagine selecting extensions like NumPy, PIL,
Tkinter, from a form and getting a customized Python source tree
(assembled by a CGI) containing all the required code and modified
Setup files. That would be really great, particularly for newbies...)

Let's discuss this on the Locator-SIG...


Andrew Kuchling
amk@...
http://people.magnet.com/%7Eamk/




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