Short:        4400 Product-Info files - 940319
Author:       fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com, et. al.
Uploader:     fnf fishpond cygnus com
Type:         fish/docs
Architecture: generic

This archive contains about 4400 Product-Info files, for material in
my floppy library (disks 1-975).  Of these 4400 files, approximately
500 were created by either myself, the authors of the material, or
other interested parties.  The remaining files were automatically
generated from "Contents" files that exist on each floppy.

These automatically generated files may contain both subtle and gross
errors.  Hopefully they will eventually be replaced with human
generated description files that are more accurate and more complete.
Part of the reason for making these files available is to encourage
interested parties (and particularly the authors) to submit better
replacements.

------------------
SUBMITTING CHANGES
------------------

If you want to help with the process of improving this database by
adding information to the existing product info files (particularly
the ones that were machine generated), fixing errors in the
Product-Info files, etc, I suggest that you use the following
technique:

  (1)	Extract the tree of product info files from the archive.
	This will create a "pifiles" directory with many subdirectories,
	one for each floppy disk and one for each CD-ROM (if included).
	This is the reference tree from which diffs will be based.

	$ lha -mraxe x pifiles-XXXX.lha

  (2)	Find the product info files that you wish to edit.  Note
	that a grep of pifiles/FileList will tell you what
	pifiles are in the tree for a specific program.  I.E.

	$ grep pifiles/FileList MuchMore
	d234/MuchMore/Product-Info
	d253/MuchMore/Product-Info
	d378/MuchMore/Product-Info
	...

  (3)	Make mirror copies in a sibling tree of the Product-Info files
	you wish to edit.  For example:

	$ mkdir pifiles.new
	$ cd pifiles.new
	$ mkdir -p d234/MuchMore
	$ cp ../pifiles/d234/MuchMore/Product-Info d234/MuchMore/Product-Info
	$ mkdir -p d253/MuchMore
	$ cp ../pifiles/d253/MuchMore/Product-Info d253/MuchMore/Product-Info
	...

	If you have the disk space you can just clone the pifiles tree as
	pifiles.new, and then just edit only those files in the pifiles.new
	tree you wish to change.  However this will greatly increase the
	time required to do the diff of the two trees.

  (4)	Edit the files you want to change:

	$ cd pifiles.new
	$ emacs d234/MuchMore/Product-Info
	$ emacs d253/MuchMore/Product-Info
	...

  (5)	Generate diffs for your files against the baseline pifiles
	tree, using GNU diff (or Unix diff):

	$ diff -rc pifiles pifiles.new >pifiles.diff

  (6)	Edit the diff file to remove the several thousand lines that
	contain gripes from diff about files that are only in the
	original pifiles tree.  There doesn't appear to be anyway to
	turn off this feature:

	$ emacs pifiles.diff

  (7)	Mail these diffs to me:

	$ mail fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com <pifiles.diff     (or equivalent)

--------------
MAKING CHANGES
-------------- 

Don't just change one Product-Info file and indiscriminately copy it
over all of the other Product-Info files for the same material.  At
the very least, the version numbers will almost certainly be
different.  The description of the material may change over time as
well.  This is OK.

Each Product-Info file should be as accurate as possible for *that*
*particular* *copy* of the corresponding material.  It is up to the
database builder or user interface to decide how to best present the
material and link the different versions together.

One possibility, for example, is to display the latest version based
on either the ".version" field or the ".date" field, and provide links
to the other earlier versions based on either the ".references" field
or by building the links on the fly as each Product-Info is added to
the database or accessed.

Thanks for your help in improving these Product-Info files!

-Fred