		keeper -- the archivist's assistant

Keeper is designed to be powerful help for overwhelmed source archive
site maintainers.  It's an interactive Perl script that automates away
most of the drudgery involved in maintaining a large Linux archive
site like Sunsite.  In fact I wrote the prototype versions of keeper
to clear up a six-month, thousand-file backup of incoming stuff on
Sunsite -- and, not counting time to write and debug it, it did the
job in less than three days.

Keeper's goal in life is to make it easy for a maintainer to do
archive maintainance, secure in the knowledge that that after every
action, (1) all derived files that need to change will be properly
rebuilt and (2) appropriate email notifications will be sent to the
package and archive maintainers.

See the man page for details.  Or just run it -- keeper has rather
complete on-line command help.

No makefile.  If you know you need this program, you're smart enough to
know how to install the Perl script and man page yourself.

(Credit where credit is due.  While the design of keeper is mine, some
code in keeper is derived from Perl written by long-time Sunsite
maintainer Erik Troan <ewt@redhat.com>, who had put together some
scratch tools for the job and wanted to do something like keeper for a
long time.)

You can easily fetch the latest version of keeper from my home page:

	http://www.ccil.org/~esr

Just chase the link to Eric's Freeware Collection.  Besides fetchmail, it
includes a tasty selection of Web authoring tools, programmer's aids,
graphics libraries, compilers for bizarre languages, games, and 
miscellaneous interesting hacks.  Enjoy!

					Eric S. Raymond
					http://www.ccil.org/~esr

Release 1.2:
   * It's now aware of symlinks.  It transplants them on file and directory
     moves, deletes them on removals.
   * don't nuke filenames of the form index[a-z]*.
   * 'look' command changed to `find', `link' command added but not yet
     implemented.
Release 1.3:
   * Change name of INDEX files to %INDEX so they show up first in FTP lists.
Release 1.4:
   * Change name of INDEX files to !INDEX, the former confuses Netscape.
   * Added author list crosscheck between source & target groups.
   * We now mail notifications on deletion.
Release 1.5:
   * Move logfile location to the archive top.
   * Consolidate all the outgoing-mail logic.
Release 1.6:
   * get_description now does something reasonable if you enter a blank line.
   * Allow long directory descriptions above the dotted line.
Release 1.7:
   * Old descriptions of files are now shown in the replacement notice.
   * READMEs are now inlined like LSMs
Release 1.8:
   * Recognize skip directives in the mirror config file.
   * Issue notifications on each description change.
Release 1.9:
   * Bug fix in the replacement notification.
Release 1.10:
   * Proper handling of directories with no non-inlineable files.
Release 1.11:
   * Recognize and make hotlinks from URLs in index header text.
Release 1.12:
   * Added the watch list feature.
Release 1.13:
   * Extend watch-listing to work on rename, mkdir, and kill commands.
   * Better stem-matching in the presence of GNU-like version numbers.
Release 1.14:
   * Generate date into all description lines in the long-form HTML.
   * Implement directory links.
Release 1.15
   * Added -c option for checking copying policies.
