Subject: Re: Current results (such as they are)

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 94 11:45:30 EST

Dear AstroWeb friends,

Today Bob sent me, by Email, his current working file, which contains
revisions to the previous database plus new resource records. This
file contains only the HTTP URLs from the original database.

I edited my Makefile so that it concatenates Bob's 52_KB file with my
155_KB file, and processes the result. This is our first real test of
the idea of combining changes from concurrent editing.  The relevant
statistics are:

 701 resource records read.
  44 identical resource records deleted. (n=657)
  63   similar resource records  merged. (n=594) 2 multiple, 12 somebody
 594 resource records written.

Of these 594 records, 577 were previously in my database: the tools
have inserted 17 resource records which Bob added recently. 

The 12 "somebody" cases are special. I added dummy OWNER fields to
many records in my copy of the database after Bob acquired his copy of
it, and so there were meaningless mergers in my first trial. I added
logic to detect and ignore those cases.

The 63 "merged" records in the 594-record database contain various
changes which Bob and I have introduced (in some cases both of us made
changes to records). In general, automatic logic cannot combine the
information in these merged records -- we must hand-edit them. I will
do this during the next few days.

I will be delighted to accept additional resource records coded in the
exchange format.

-Don

PS: I have added Daniel Egret to the astroweb.dis mailing list because
he is working with Andre on the CDS implementations.