Hello Wilfred,

On Monday February 05 2018 14:19, you wrote to me:

 MvdV>> My first suggestion for 2019 is to drop the compression and use
 MvdV>> .NWS for the extension. Precompression is no longer needed in
 MvdV>> this day and age and it makes it easier te read Fidonews
 MvdV>> on-line.

 WV> This has little to do with the zip filename problem. And uncompressed
 WV> FNEWS files already have their (different) naming convention.

Changing the naming convention is a good opportunity to also change something
else: the compression.

 WV> Some people still prefer compressed:

Some people still prefer gas light over electric. If we have to halt progress
because a small number of people still prefer the old way, there would be no
progress.

 WV> - Not every mail supports on the fly compression.
 WV> - Some people still use pots to connect to fidonet.

POTS did not stop at 300 Bps. Even at the low speed of 14k4 and no compression
on the fly, it is only 20 seconds a week.

 WV> For storage it also has it's advantages:
 WV> - Less space used.

Mwah.. The ENTIRE Fidonews archive from day 1 till today is less than 100Mb
uncompressed. Less than 0,25% of my smallest Hard Drive. Try to buy a HD
smaller than 40GB these days.

 WV> - The checksum in the zip file protects against unnoticed changes to
 WV> the file. (You can't accidentally edit the zip file for instance,
 WV> which could happen when you view the plain text file with an editor).

Use a read only editor or flag the file as write protected. I prefer the
convienece of not having to unpack it over the very small risk of accidentally
damaging the file.

Plus that nothing stops anyone from using their preferred compression for
archiving purposes.

 MvdV>> The second suggestion is to swap the sequence number and the
 MvdV>> year indicator. So the first issue in 2019 will be
 MvdV>> FNEWS01A.NWS.

 WV> That would break the chronological order of the files when you list a
 WV> directory with FNEWS (zip)files alphabetically (which most filesystems
 WV> do).

Do as I do, store each year in a sperate directory.

 MvdV>> This preserves the 8x3 file format, avoids making a difference
 MvdV>> between upper and lower case, avoids non alfanumeric characters
 MvdV>> (i.e avoids anything that stone age software may have a problem
 MvdV>> with) and it will give us another 26 years.

 WV> I suggest changing FNEWS to FNEWT. Maybe not so nice,

Rightout ugly.

 WV> but it will keep the chronological order of the files, and we can use
 WV> FNEWU in 26 years (if fidonet still exists ;)), etc...

In the unlikely event that Fidonet and Fidonews still exist in 2044, we will
hopefully have freed ourselves from the 8x3 limit and use more descriptive long
file names.

And if not... we can use FNEWS0A1.NWS for the first issue of 2044. Just like we
do with numbers on a car's license plate. Nobody complains that /those/ do not
sort chronologically.


Cheers, Michiel

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