Subject:
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Re: Storage and Display of OMR Files
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw
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Date:
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Sat, 3 Jul 1999 20:41:41 GMT
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Viewed:
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976 times
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At 12:14 PM 7/3/99 , Todd Lehman wrote:
> In lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, Tim Courtney writes:
> > [...]
> > - If the newsgroup URL's change like they have in the past, there will be
> > a whole lot of broken links.
>
> Ooops, I thought I covered that when I wrote this yesterday about the
> sets-DB:
>
> "Those URLs aren't guaranteed to be the final URLs in the system for
> sets, but when they move to a better URL nomenclature for sets,
> there'll be automatic backward-compatibility (URL-forwarding)
> functionality, just like there is for the old-format URLs of news
> articles. So it's safe to rely on those URLs as being functional."
>
> To be more specific, no, if the newsgroup URL's change again, there won't
> be any broken links. Firstly, the new newsgroup URL's were designed to be
> extremely long-lasting, and secondly, have a quick peek at one of the old
> URL's... Here's an old one, for example:
[...]
> So in fact, while the newsgroup URL's have changed, all of the
> old newsgroup URL's still work perfectly fine. Neat, huh? :)
Nifty-poos.
> > I wouldn't mind having the newsgroup hierarchy reflect themes and
> > subthemes:
> >
> > cad.dat.omr.space.* (subthemes)
> > cad.dat.omr.town.*
> > cad.dat.omr.pirates.*
>
> Hmm, that sounds intriguing...so there could be this whole sub-hierarchy
> of .cad.dat for representing OMR stuff, and people could crosspost there
> and to the .cad.dat.models.sets group? Or do you think it would be best
> to nix .cad.dat.models.sets and replace it altogether with .cad.dat.omr.* ?
Hmm... it could be more organized nixing the models.sets, but then again
the discussion on each subgroup would be pretty minimal that a main group
would be almost necessary to keep discussion going. We could of course
make the main group cad.dat.omr and kill the models.sets to put the
discussion there. But anyways, with categorized omr subgroups there will
be a lot of crossposting.
> There's no script that does that currently, but in the ZIP/tarball case,
> I don't think it would be too difficult to write. Once there is any list
> of links to specific articles, it's pretty straightforward to iterate over
> that list and do whatever with the content.
>
> I don't know how feasable it would be to automatically package a collection
> of DATs up as an MPD.
Ok, I was thinking zipping an mpd, you were thinking zipping a bunch of dats.
> > Why both? Would it be considered redoubling efforts and a waste of time to
> > store it both places?
>
> Why both? Well, because it gives people the best of both worlds, right?
> Newbies and non-geeks could grab nice, clean, carefully selected ZIP
> collections of models from ldraw.org, and serious, deeper users and geeks
> could go for the more 'raw' stuff from the newsgroups. The versions on
> ldraw.org could be actual raw DAT files, ZIPped up or given directly as
> application/x-ldraw, or could be links to the newsgroup messages, or whatever
> makes the most sense for people accessing from there.
Good point. But with the zip files we need adequate documentation telling
the user what directories to create to unzip it to. Because it needs to
wind up in
sets/XXXXZ-YY/
to work the way we intend.
> > Or would it be cleaner and more efficient to store
> > them on ldraw.org as well?
>
> If it's automated, then efficiency isn't much of an issue. I think that
> whatever 'cleaner' means is in the eye of the beholder; different people
> probably want to access things differently. I don't know; I haven't done
> a survey on it.
We could do a survey about OMR file locations encompassing all aspects of
what will happen with download at ldraw.org and the newsgroups and
discussion, as well as the idea of downloading directly from the newsgroups...
> I think it's possible that 75% (or more) of users would rather download ZIP
> files from ldraw.org than from a newsgroup, but the flip-side of that is
> that a newsgroup venue makes it so incredibly easy to download fresh new
> stuff the instant it appears, and more importantly, to integrate the
> discussion if there are problems. So having both would really rock, IMO.
We should also include file format preference in the survey, just to know
what people are looking for.
Having both would be a plus. It would obviously take a day or two to get a
model in the OMR download section, even with a database (which will be run
off my machine) to generate a new static page with the new addition included.
> Good idea. Nice to see the OPL is coming along now, too.
>
> Although news articles in the LUGNET system are not in general under OPL,
> we could certainly make any of the OMR models automatically fall under OPL,
> since the LUGNET Terms of Use (section #7 in the first half) covers
> sublicensing to third parties and it's broad enough that OPL is a subset
> of that. So, all that would need to be done to the part that spits out
> DAT content is add the following to the top of each:
Would you mention OPL in the Lugnet terms of use and how it applies
specifically to OMR content?
> 0 Copyright (c) <year> by <author's name or designee>. This material
> 0 may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth
> 0 in the Open Publication License, vX.Y or later (the latest version is
> 0 presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
>
> That message could be added automatically by the server, or, alternatively,
> it could be made a requirement that each author add this manually (the
> latter is probably wiser, even though the LUGNET Terms of Use technically
> permit re-releasing anything in the system under OPL without the author's
> permission).
But will people add that? And also, is that too much to have on a header
of each submodel? Or would it be a comment in the mpd? It looks good (and
I can see it was pasted from the OPL site), but it would make the model
files rather bulky. I would say that it should go below the OMR header...
> > Well, would it be possible to consider links back to the OMR once it is up
> > and running?
>
> Oh, definitely...I think that would be very helpful to people.
I'll work on getting images ready for that once I get some other pages
buttoned down.
Another thing of much importance is the display of the model entries for
download on the OMR download page. I have thought of different methods and
haven't come up with the best one yet. We need to categorize it by theme
and subtheme. Is it overdoing it to make directories and pages for each
theme and subtheme?
I considered a DHTML collapsible list for links to all these pages, but 1)
couldn't get it to work and 2) found out it only worked on 4.0+ browsers.
So would it be good just to do a heirarchy link thing similar in structure
to Yahoo categories to link to these pages? If we did do subtheme pages it
would be nice and we could even put subtheme logos and stuff there and
eventually spice those pages up a bit.
My main concern here I guess is that it is going to be very extremely
tedious to do this by hand. The database that is sort of planned for this
will be offline and won't be ready for a couple months. Meaning it will be
run from my machine generating static pages from entries versus generating
pages on the fly on the server. I would prefer the latter, but Jacob said
he needs the CPU for other things. Still, we probably won't have a flood
of new entries all at once, so it shouldn't be that bad.
-Tim <><
http://www.zacktron.com
AIM: timcourtne
ICQ: 23951114
Give an airhead email and its the end of the world - three words: forwarded
chain letters. Any questions?
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Storage and Display of OMR Files
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| (...) Nah, why go through all that work? -- just embed the directory name into the zipfile. I'm a bit rusty on pkzip (I use tar these days) but essentially: pkzip xxxxz-yy.zip sets\xxxxz-yy\*.* which is analagous to tar -cvf xxxxz-yy.tar (...) (25 years ago, 15-Jul-99, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw)
| | | Re: Storage and Display of OMR Files
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| (...) Duh, I forgot you could do that in zip files :) (...) That could be part of the conditions of posting... (...) Below the OMR header is good... (...) Sorry, not yet. I'm working on ldraw webring images at this moment, and I gotta do some (...) (25 years ago, 15-Jul-99, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Storage and Display of OMR Files
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| (...) Ok, I see. And I can see advantages and disadvantages to that too: Advantages: - Set can be publicly accessible for comments and editing before placed on a site and approved. - Set can be sent to one place and multiple model editors can have (...) (25 years ago, 1-Jul-99, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw)
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