THIS IS RBASE+RECCAT VERSION 0.2

Current as of 22nd April 1995

This represents the work of a group of third-year undergraduates on
the short course in Engineering Information Technology at the
department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, The University of
Leeds, UK.  The course was supervised by me, Dr Nick Bailey, and
consisted of an introduction to tool-based programming.  Prior to this
course, the students had programming experience only in C (mostly on
DOS-Based machines).  Eight lecture-hours later, they are familiar
with at least tcl/tk and awk.

As a demostrator project, I asked them to write a Record Library
Catalogue program based on an old C program I had written (called
Rbase) on an Atari ST machine without a hard disk.  The resulting wish
scripts, whilst they appear to work reasonably well on a Sun or
486/Linux machine, ran a little slowly on my 386/Linux platform at
home.  I therefore made minor modifications to permit my more
processor-efficient C program to be called from the wish script.


To install
==========

Copy the .tk files and the .awk file into a directory of your choise
wherein your record database file will reside.  Set the MAINPATH
variable in reccat, and put this script somewhere which is in your
path.  Compile RBase (just gcc rbase.c -o rbase will do) and move that
somewhere in your path too.  You can use the rbase program in terminal
mode; if you want to do this, you might change the default database
filespec in rbase.h to whatever you intend to use (*before* compiling
it!!).  In terminal mode, the ? command gives some help (though not
very much!).


The Database file
=================

Having a default filename of records.rfd, the database file has the
following format:

*COMPOSERA
Title1|other stuff|more other stuff|medium(CD,Cass,whatever)
Title2|info fields|as above|DAT
*COMPOSERB
...

The composers should appear in strict alphabetical order.


Bugs
====

There are some restrictions on the number of fields in the reccat
program, and only the title and composer fields have special meanings
attached.

Modify/Add/Delete may have bugs: I use emacs instead, so *keep backups
of your record database file*

If you want to send any patches for these or other problems (no doubt
they exist), feel free to email me, "N.J.Bailey@leeds.ac.uk".


COPYING
=======

Warranty:  THERE IS NO WARRANTY, express or implied, covering this
program.  We accept NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER for damages and losses
arising out of the use or inability to use any part of this software.
Copies may be made and distributed freely, so long as they contain all
files (including source files, documentation files, and this file).

Users are encouraged to send a picture postcard with messages of
support to me at Dept Electronic Engineering, The University of Leeds,
Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom.  Such postcards will be
proudly displayed on a departmental noticeboard provided that is not
against the Obscene Publications Act or some other UK legislation.

Share and enjoy!

Nick Bailey,
April 1995.
