And because it's Christmas soon, here is my wishlist: There should be
hooks (exits) in the software for archive programs. Maybe it's better to
give an example: We act as a file server of the Info-Modula-2 Source Archive
for the Bitnet world. Most contributions are in (Unix) Shar form.
I would like to store the members of such a shar archive as individual
files (retrievable on a per file base or as 'package'). But unpacking the
shar archives could result in name conflicts due to the flat name space of CMS.
We have a hierarchical archive program (with the additional benefit of
reduced space requirements due to packing). To send the file 'FOO BAR'
from the package 'BLAH' the file server must perform
  PROGLIB GET BLAH FOO BAR
  SENDFILE FOO BAR TO ...
  ERASE FOO BAR
Actually our file server uses the Netserv software and I don't have the
time to modify it to do this. If there were a file
server which is tailorable so that it can find files for shipment not
only from plain CMS file systems, I would happy (and it would save
a lot of disk space here).
 
I think this could be done by associating special exits to file lists.
This would give the file server a flexible way to decide how to retrieve
the specified file from the specified package. Of course the syntax of
the GET/SEND/whatever command had to be expanded (e.g. 'SEND foo bar FROM blah'
as in some ARPA-land file servers).
 
  Thomas
 
P.S.: I don't think that the mechanism should depend on a special program.
But if it helps I would be glad to contribute our PROGLIB program.
Why should file server disks be wasted by uncompressed files?