id-libraries

[LegalizeAdulthood]

Grab 'em while they're hot!

https://github.com/LegalizeAdulthood/id-libraries

TL;DR: The id-libraries repository collects extant fractal data files and organizes them into libraries.

The master branch has the concept of 'libraries' for data files. A list of libraries for loading files and a single library for saving files. This will be part of the 2.0 release. I wanted to gather more formula files for testing the parser and along the way I realized that all these old web sites with collections of formulas, parameter sets, etc., were all offline. You had to use archive.org to find old snapshots, plus sometimes the files weren't exactly ready for use as they might be raw mail or usenet messages with the commentary still present in the formula file or parameter file. Plus the formulas were often inter-mixed with the parameters (using the frm: convention on the entry name) making it difficult to re-use the formulas.

The old way of organizing things was to glom everything together with the ORGFORM DOS program, or find your own mechanism for organizing the files manually with a text editor. With libraries, things can reach another level of organization because Id can search an arbitrary number of locations for locating data files

So, the archaeology continues... previously, I recreated the evolution of the DOS FRACTINT code.

Now I'm scraping archive.org snapshots to gather together all those 90s FRACTINT data files into a series of libraries.
I've done basic validation of the text files with python scripts to ensure that all referenced formulas, l-systems, etc. in a parameter set are included with the library containing the parameter set. This makes for some duplication across the repository, but makes individual libraries easier to use as a coherent collection. Everything has been case-corrected so they should be more usable on linux where the filesystem is case sensitive. I bet there are a lot of hidden gems in there.

Even if you had the old ORGFORM collections or the mailing list collections, many errors have been corrected in this collection of libraries. You will find simple python scripts that perform the validation. (In fact, if you wanted to continue with an ORGFORM style, it would be a simple matter of writing a similar python script that combines things in that manner.) The new libraries I've created may or may not be present in the ORGFORM library. I have no intention of maintaining that collection as a global catch-all over all the other collections but it is there if you want to use it.

It turns out this lines up well with my long-term plans for how user data files are managed in Id, but that's quite a ways off from now which is why I haven't talked about it much. :)