software organization

[Cory5412]

This thread is for coordinating between members of the "sw-contribs" group on the server. The sw-contribs group is user accounts who have write access to the sw-classic and sw-osx shares on vtools.

At this moment, that is:

- Cory5412

- laporta

- kaa

All are welcome to contribute ideas/responses, but the sw-cotnribs group has the actual access to make changes on the sw shares on the server.

Please let me know if you  would like to be added to this group!

Incoming software should be placed in the "sw-incoming" folder under public.

 

[Cory5412]

I did a bit of a preliminary sort on what I had on hand for the osx-sw section - it's gone a little out of scope within the Apple section, but I'm amenable to placing whatever people think will be relevant to hold onto.

One thing to be aware of is that where possible, we will want to grab multi-lingual versions of things. (i.e. when we go to pull down Firefox 2 or 3 whatever, we should grab it for every language.) We can decide how to sort that later, but AFAIK most of these companies have the same names everywhere so it would make sense to me that we either do language folders inside a version folder

(For example: Mozilla -> Firefox -> 2.0 -> 2.0.20 -> EN-US -> firefox20.0.20-en-us.dmg) or that we just stick all the builds for a version in a folder (for example Mozilla -> Firefox -> 2.0 -> 20.0.20 -> firefox20.0.20-[lang].dmg where there'd be 38 or whatever builds and one is en-us and another is se-sv and another is en-uk and ca-fr and so on).



OS X era Apple is pretty good on this front in that most of its software installers are multilingual.

The other thing I haven't put in here is documentation or notes files. For example, if I have a serial number for Fetch, I might put in a file that says "Fetch Readme". The readme/doc files, I imagine, should have a standardized-ish format but I haven't gotten too far on what that should be, if anyone wants to throw out some ideas I'd love to hear them, and ideally will have compatible OS versions listed. (Fetch 5.7 for example is a release that works on, like, Sierra, so it's a little out of scope here but I had it on hand and it's not too big.)

The other decision, and this will probably be ad-hoc and per version, is to decide how granularly to organize things. i.e. for Fetch should those all be together in Fetch 5 or should they each be in folders for Fetch 5.X or should they be in folders split by Fetch 5.X.Y.

Also, I'm working on getting the macgarden_incoming share up, I wanted to put the data on a slightly more robust purpose-built external disk, instead of having the internal disks rattling away in the toaster.

 

[LaPorta]

I would assume Cory that publishing some sort of text guide as to the format of Read Me files would be very helpful. We could pin it to this thread so that we can all follow it. It would be easy enough to copy and paste boilerplate format to make a template to add to each folder.

Second, are we to help with the organizing, or will you do that from your end exclusively? I am just making arbitrary folders and file names that make sense to me in what I am uploading. For instance, there are many discs I have that are the same software but different disc versions (next up for me is iLife 5 disc version 2 and 2.1 Who knows what the difference is, but I reflect it in the file names as to avoid confusion. We can re-name them as necessary, but it appears you want to re-name them into folders. That sounds good.

As for languages, I assume many of our multi-national compatriots can fill in that gap for us, at least in most files.

 

[Cory5412]

Yeah, I'll work on something in terms of a template or an example for the readme files. They'll probably be a little different between the OS X software and the Classic software. I need to test some cross-compatibility but I would say TextEdit RTF/RTFD format is probably fine for all OS X apps and SimpleText or TeachText for Classic stuff. 

In terms of the overall organization, the intent is ultimately for some other people to be able to actually do it. Right nwo, you and kaa and maybe one or two other pepole are in sw-contribs which is a group that grants r/w access to the software shares folders. There's going to be a macgarden_incoming share with the contents of that macgarden torrent and some will get access to that to help sort and bring that stuff into the fold.