digital everything (media) library - MAME 211, merge v. split packs - TODO

[Zenaan Harkness]

The personal digital library is yet to be handled.

We have ebook collections, torrents of books, vids, musak (strictly
the crappy elevator musak only of course), and software such as MAME/
MESS rom sets etc.

Torrents are gettin a little prehistoric.

The discerning hoarder needs (in that fundamental, life sustaining
kinda need way) something a little more steam age, something tied to
a modern VCS.

One's personal library, given today's "barely enough" storage ratios,
is inevitably spread across drives, sticks and internal storage.

As muh collection grows, the most sane directory hierarchy changes:
when storing say a dozen movies, a few audio CDs and a hanful of
books, one directory per library item seems eminently reasonable,
although the discerning librarian probably puts these 20 or so items
into a "library" directory.

As that grows, one leaps to the space age idea (almost an original
concept when the neophyte first thinks of it) to categorize one's
library into media types, and so under library/ come movies/, books/,
musak/ and software/, leaving said neofight stunned at the awesome
power of computers and the wonderous organizing power of his own
mind.

Soon enough, a few audio CDs turns into a few hundred, with many
from this almost universal site call GewTube, and so some of the
music is more like video, some of the video more like music, and
movies, documentaries, tv series and home videos all evidently need
new and new sub, categories.

One "small library" man's "awesome categorization" inevitably ends up
baroque or perhaps gothic, and forever needing re-organization.

Then the wonder of symlinks rears its deceptive head as the next
silver bullet, Debian's alphabetical directory layer divides the dirs
such that the large one's become "hopefully not too large", per LANG/
dirs make an appearance, DEWEY looks reasonable and BIBLIO is perhaps
useful, and before you know it, there are a dozen different
half-updated sets of media dirs, intermixed with various layers of
{a-z}s/, LANGs/, incomings/, to-sorts/ and the original plain old
categories/, none ever complete or finalized.

Then MAME appears evidently time consumptive to stay up to date, but
git could and would provide a much more eminently reasonable
versioning and distribution system, if only there were a proper
integration with git, rom set bundles, and torrents, with stable
"reproducible build" like git packs to be distributed Debian package
distribution/ mirror style or plain old torrents.

Then we want (anonymous) requests, so those who archive offline can
bring online occasionally when a request or three appears on the
anonywebs for some old yet timeless niche trainspotting number.

Default dark for semi literate sanity, avoiding 12 yo "muh Brittany"
arrest spectacles …


Yes we are handling a lot of complexity, but we have a lot of hero
tier level ups to achieve yet...

Good luck ;)

For those just setting out on their MAME journey, kick off with a rom
set:

ec6410d0fdbff75993745d197fae50d488a3e469
(~ 64GiB, merged)

Then git out yer git programming skills and automate the 'tomatobill.

Hero I tell ya, hero :D