Requests for Archivers

• Have an index file (believe it or not, a few sites don't have one) and have its format be consistent. In particular, I need some regular expression that defines record separators; if a blank line is your record separator, don't use blank lines within records (e.g. to separate paragraphs in an abstract. Heck, I thought abstracts were supposed to be a single paragraph anyway...)
• If you want to include directions on how to FTP stuff, it's best to put them in a separate file (e.g. README) and not the same one as the index. If you simply must put these in the same file, please be sure the directions section doesn't include names of real tech reports or filenames, since this may create spurious entries.
• Do not compress or otherwise obscure the index file. Compressing long PostScript tech reports is a good idea; compressing index files that are often browsed is not.
• Do not dink around with the layout of your filespace unnecessarily. Every week I get complaints that some university or other is no longer working, and usually it's becuase somebody changed the index filename from Index to INDEX, or maybe started a new file called INDEX-94 and stopped updating the old one, or accidentally left the index file unreadable because of a bad default umask, or...
• Have filenames that are globally unique. Having files named things like TR-94-03.ps.Z is good; having files named things like 03.ps.Z is a pain.
• Have a consistently available site. It's quite frustrating to have hypertext anchors that only work 60% of the time. In addition, if your site happens to be unavailable for an extended period of time when the index is rebuilt (starting at 4:00 EST on Saturday morning, normally), you may not be included.
• Make the modification times on your files accurately reflect the currency of the information. If you don't know how to change the modification time on a file to an arbitrary value, ask your friendly UNIX hacker.
• If you're not included in the sitelist file and you want to be, send mail to me. Please include:
  • The preferred FTP address of your site
  • The pathname that the reports are under
  • The name and format of the index file (most importantly, what the record separators are.)
  • The name of your institution or group you want to use. (I tend to abbreviate these heavily to keep output compact.) Note that it will be displayed without context, so it should be globally meaningful.

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Marc V