> 1) Someone needs to go through and figure out a mapping from the old
> file names to new file names with consistent endings. It will be
> tedious.
By mapping, do you mean a general rule which can be used for a script,
or just do them all by hand? If we only have to do it once, it might
be more work to make a script then to just rename the darn things. Or,
if the system I suggest below is agreeable, we might adopt the system
of once we move something out of untested, it gets renamed to fit the
extension conventions.
> 2) Unless someone has a better suggestion, I would propose to put
> combine all the share-like directories in to one directory called
> "share". "sym" and "tensor" would become subdirectories of "share".
> I'm not terribly happy about this, but I don't have a better idea.
> Please either come up with a better idea, or convince me that this
> idea is good enough.
Here's a modified/improved version of a proposal I sent in a while back
on this problem - it's not great, but it might let us get somewhere and
would be slightly more organzied than jamming everything in share.
Scrap the share system completely and instead have three directories -
extensions, untestedextensions and nonworkingextensions. extensions
would be for packages which are tested and working. Nonworking could
hold things like the share2 vect package, which apparently isn't
working right now but we don't want to get rid of - basically for
unmaintained stuff which isn't stable or usable. untested would be
where everything would start out, and as each package is verified to be
working or not working we can move it to the appropriate directory,
renaming in the process. It's probably idle to hope we can do much
more than rename the files and test a few before 5.9 - the job is just
too big. This way, we would have a system in place, and as we
gradually work our way through the mess we would know what the status
of something is by virtue of where it is. It's not ideal, of course -
the best way would be a huge testing bing to see if they are all
working, but that's way beyond our resources. We might want a
directory in the future for incomingextensions, as people contribute
new stuff, but I suspect it will be a while before we have to worry
about that in a big way.
CY
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