General Information on AcorNet

We have changed the whole concept for AcorNet. So this readme isn't up do date any more. But it will give you a brief idea what we intend to offer with AcorNet

The philosophy of AcorNet

Please note:AcorNet is an (unofficial) clone of aminet with slight modifications. If you don't know about aminet, read on.

AcorNet brings together some fundamental (mostly simpel) ideas. Our basic goal is to provide an easy and effective access to all software archives on AcorNet sites. Our main features:

descriptive .txt-Files for each archive: giving a short summary of its contents. This shall give you an idea of what you can obtain.
OOIndex for every directory: created automatically, these files provide an overview of all files of a certain "genre", e.g. you may find out at one glance which demos can be downloaded from this server.
Recent7/14/28-Files: There you can find the most recent uploads, sorted by date and covering the last 7/14/28 days. So you don't need to browse all directory trees by hand, searching for new stuff/actual releases and so on...
Recent7/14/28-Folders: offering softlinks to files newer than 7/14/28 days
WWW pages: displaying all 00Index/Recent-Files in html format. Get a short description by clicking onto the .txt entries. Click onto an archive's name to download it.
ardt: is a download tool for AcorNet. The way to use it is very similar to nn or tin. After starting ardt, it shows you all new stuff, including file size and a short description. With simple key presses you can display an archive's .txt-file or mark it to be downloaded. It's also possible to view ALL files on the server (sorted on filename or directory name). There are still more features - all of which dont't make the standard ftp look good. :) However the main advantage of ardt is it's user friendlyness! If you run it regularly, it will only show you the things which are new, so it won't be easy for you to miss out new archives.. :)

With AcorNet we try to avoid the following handicaps of conventional archives: In brackets () you find how we want to improve things.

ftp is rather circumstantial to use (ardt/WWW browsers should make your life easier)
It's sometimes not easy to spot new files on a server (all recent-files/dirs are also available as a WWW page, ardt only displays the new files, unless you want to see all)
You don't know exactly what an archive contains (A short description should accompany all 00Index/Recent-files)
Sometimes one must look at different servers (Hensa/Stuttgart/..) to find a special program. (If AcorNet grows (mirror sites) all software which has been uploaded on one of its servers will be available from all others within one/two days. This means that you only need to browse the site which is nearest to you or has the best data transfer rate. All servers should at least keep the software from the last 7/14/28 days. If a site has not enough disk space to hold older stuff, it might be necessary to log into another. However we don't think that this will be a real problem...)

Constituents of AcorNet

.txt-Files: Each archive has a .txt-file which contains information about the author, uploader, a brief description and a one-line-short-description. This one-line-description will be displayed in all automatically generated documents.
Recent-Files: The RECENT-Files show the new files from the last 7/14/28 days, sorted by date. Thus you can see what's new - without browsing large file-lists via ftp or other ugly tools.
Recent-Folder: The recent-folder provides softlinks to the archives listed in the recent-files Thus you can chose from the recent-file whatever you want without the need of entering several directories in order to download these files. This is mainly for users which don't use ardt or www.
Tree: The tree structures the archives in AcorNet. The Tree-files contain small descriptions for each directory.
WWW pages: All ASCII-files (Tree, 00Index, Recent,...) are available as www-pages for convenient access.
ardt: ardt is a patched adt (aminet-download-tool) for the use with AcorNet. It shows you the newest/all/all local archives with their name and size and a short description. You can sort by dir/name/..., tag the files which you want and download them automagically. Also you can press 'r' to read the .txt-File for any archive.
ardt is available as C-source and precompiled binary for a few unix-systems at pub/acorn/long/ardt/

Additional Information (FAQ like):

What do I need to open a new AcorNet site?

First of all, you have to be the maintainer of a FTP-site. :)
You have to install the directory tree of AcorNet on your hard disc. (Be careful: A directory name must not be longer than 8 chars, and the complete pathname dir1/dir2 must not exceed 12 chars! Anyway it would be the best to use the same names than we do..)
It's also vital to put all archives (together with their .txt-files) into the second directory hierarchy level.
You call one of our script files which will create the following files automatically:
- RECENT7/14/28 files in the root directory
- TREE (also in the root dir) contains the tree structure
- LOCAL (also in the root dir) all local archives
- recent7/14/2 folders (with softlinks to all new files)
- info/adt/-files (for ardt)
- info/www/-files (for www-access)
If you want to find out more about these files you can visit our site and look how it works here.

To sum things up: You have to make sure that all archives/.txt-files are in the right place! Then call the script file and watch how the files described above are created. The easiest way would be to mirror another AcorNet server and call the script after that.

How should I mirror AcorNet?

Unfortunately we can't say much about that (yet!), because we have no experiences with it (yet!). You could, of course, use the normal perl-mirror-script. In this case it's very important to configure it NOT to get the 00Index/Recent/...-files of another site!

Why don't you mirror Hensa/Stuttgart...?

Because we have only approx. 100MB of disc space available (yet). That's one of the reasons why we need other sites joining us!

To which servers may I upload new software?

As we currently have only one server... put your soft into: ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/acorn/upload

This document was created automagically with WWW-HomeMaker0.02alpha.

Peter Böckmann pgpeter@informatik.uni-siegen.de