Joerg writes:
> The major announce list I am on is CTAN-ANN (@shsu.edu), it gives a rather
> comprehensive account of the CTAN News.
Yes, definitely. I'm also subscbribed to "tex-archive", but that list
seems to be mostly idle quite unlike "ctan-ann". The only people I've
ever seen posting on "tex-archive" were Karl Berry and Nelson Beebe,
i.e. people maintaining their own archive sites independent from CTAN.
Judging from the volume, moving *all* announcements to "ctan-ann" would
seem more reasonable.
> However, if you want to get daily change information, maybe you should set
> up a mirror an get mirror update notices. The university of Mainz has a
> partial mirror from which I get such notices (of course for the respective
> part only).
There are other ways to get daily updates. For about a year or so my
daily morning routine (besides reading mail and news) included ftp'ing
the latests FILES.last07days. Now, I've set up a cron job to do it at
6 o'clock in the morning, sort it appropriately, and mail it to me,
so that I can read it with my other mail. Very convenient, I must say.
Cheers, Ulrik.
---- cut here ----
# Ulrik Vieth's crontab file
# (last modified 1995/08/29)
#
# Every moring at 6:00 get the most recent "FILES.last07days" from ftp.dante.de,
# sort the contents and send it by mail.
0 6 * * 1-5 /home/vieth/bin/ftpscript.last07days >/dev/null 2>&1
0 6 * * 0 /home/vieth/bin/ftpscript.byname >/dev/null 2>&1
---- cut here ----
#!/bin/sh
## This shell script is intended to be run from cron every night.
##
filename=FILES.last07days
# Connect to ftp.dante.de and retrieve the file FILES.last07days.
#
cd /home/vieth/FTP
ftp ftp.dante.de << EOF
cd tex-archive
get FILES.last07days
EOF
# Sort the list of file by date (reversed order) and by file name.
#
/opt/gnu/bin/sort -o $filename -k1,2r -k5 $filename
# If the file isn't too big, mail it to me, so that i can read it
# together with my other mail in the morning
#
if [ `wc -c $filename | awk '{print $1}'` -lt 60000 ];
then
cat $filename |\
/usr/ucb/mail -s "FILES.last07days as of `date | awk '{print $1,$2,$3,$NF}`" vieth
else
echo "Something big has arrived on ftp.dante.de" |\
/usr/ucb/mail -s "FILES.last07days is too big today" vieth
fi
---- cut here ----
#!/bin/sh
## This shell script is intended to be run from cron every weekend.
##
filename=FILES.byname.gz
# Connect to ftp.dante.de and retrieve the file FILES.byname.gz.
#
cd /home/vieth/FTP
ftp ftp.dante.de << EOF
bin
cd tex-archive
get FILES.byname.gz
EOF