[MacPerl] MacPerl CD-ROM frobs

[Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com>]

Dear people:

We have worked out some ideas on how the MacPerl CD-ROM should look
and act.  Please let us know if these notions make sense to you, if
you have any suggestions or criticisms, etc.

  *  The disc will be written in HFS format.  Specifically, we plan
     to create an HFS Jaz disk, fill it, Norton it, defragment it,
     stomp it onto a one-off, and duplicate it.

  *  The disc will contain:

	-  top-level HTML files by PTF, for navigation

	-  "Macintized" docs from ADVICE Press (mostly HTML)

	-  a "Macintized" snapshot of the CPAN

	-  redistributable Macintosh utilities (Alpha, Fetch, MPW, ...)

	-  a MacPerl folder, containing the Installer, notes, etc.

  *  The ADVICE and CPAN trees will be modified somewhat:

	-  {ADVICE,CPAN}/ports will be removed.  These are binary
	   installation images for non-Mac systems.

	-  foo.*.tar.gz will be uncompressed and unpacked into foo/
	   (foo.*.tar.gz will be saved for reference, as-is)

	   Actually, we will avoid uncompressing the largest *.tar.gz
	   and *.gz files (e.g., files which exceed 4 MB); otherwise,
	   we would overflow the CD-ROM!

	-  remaining *.gz files (non-tar) will then be uncompressed

	-  All *.gz files will be moved to _gz_ folders, as:

		by-author/
		  RMORIN/
		    _gz_
		      foo.1.23.readme.gz
		      foo.1.23.tar.gz
		    foo.1.23.readme
		    foo.1.23/
		      ... (unpacked files and folders) ...

	-  file names which cause heartburn for HFS will be tweaked

	-  symlinks from/to foo.*.tar.gz will be changed to foo.*

	-  any remaining symlinks to files will be resolved into
	   the files themselves

	-  any remaining symlinks will appear as HFS aliases

	-  CRs (and CR/LFs) in all text files will be turned into LFs

	-  *.pl files will be given a Creator of "R*ch" (MacPerl's)
	   and a Type of "TEXT"

Rationale:

  Filenames *have* to work within HFS rules, so they will (somehow).

  Aliases to folders act pretty rationally; double click on one and you
  get dropped into the target folder.  Once the user lands there, he can
  grab "real" files and folders and drag them, examine them, etc.

  By punting the ports, we free up enough room to unpack everything else
  (except for a relatively small fraction of truly gigantic archives).
  This, coupled with converting the line termination characters, should
  make it convenient for users to browse (or even run) the scripts, etc.

  We may make mistakes in unpacking and line frobbing.  Also, it is quite
  possible that a user would want to grab foo.1.23.tar.gz and move it to
  a UNIX box.  So, we should leave the original gzip files lying around.

  Similarly, we should leave the unconverted (though uncompressed)
  text files lying around (if they were NOT part of a tar archive).

  Perl sources *could* be given Alpha or BBEdit T&C, but that would be
  playing favorites.  So, we settled on MacPerl's T&C...

Comments, as always, are solicited...

-r

Rich Morin, Canta Forda Computer Laboratory | Prime Time Freeware - quality
  UNIX consulting, training, and writing    | freeware at affordable prices
  P.O. Box 1488, Pacifica, CA, 94044, USA   | www.ptf.com      info@ptf.com
  rdm@cfcl.com            +1 650-873-7841   | +1 408-433-9662   -0727 (Fax)



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