Re: Thank you for public-inbox!

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 30, 2018, 03:30 UTC
Message-ID: <20180830033000.GD665@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20180829100243.GA28180@dcvr>

On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 10:02:43AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> > I've thought about mirroring it to a public server as well, just for
> > redundancy. But without the same domain, I'm not sure it would be all
> > that useful as a community resource.
> 
> I wouldn't get too attached to the domain, "public-inbox.org" is
> too long for my tastes anyways.  "peff.net/git/$MESSAGE_ID"
> would actually be more user-friendly :>
> 
> A generic Message-ID redirection/finding service would be good,
> (maybe some DHT thing, but... has that taken off for git blobs, yet?)

Yes, and I agree that the URL portability is one of the things I really love about public-inbox (after all, I do have my own archive and now I can follow people's public-inbox links into my very-fast local copy).

I guess I just wonder if I set up a mirror on another domain, would anybody actually _use_ it? I'd think most people would just go to public-inbox.org as the de facto URL.

> Anyways I hope to teach public-inbox to auto-linkify Message-ID-looking
> strings "<XXXXXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXX>" into URLs for domain-portability,
> (but it's ambiguous with email addresses).  But yeah, I don't
> like things being tied to domain names.

That would be neat, but I think it actually makes references less useful in a lot of cases. URLs are universally understood, which means:

 - people who don't know about public-inbox can just follow the link
   (and in fact, that's how they learn how useful it is!)

 - even for people who do know about it, they are likely to read mails
   in their MUA. And most MUAs have some mechanism for easily following
   a URL, but won't know how to auto-linkify a message-id.

So I too dream of a world where I can say "give me more information on this identifier" and my tools search a peer to peer distributed hash table for it. But I don't think we live in that world yet.

At the very least, I think if we plan to reference without an http URL that we would use something like URI-ish, like <mid:ABC@XYZ>. That gives tools a better chance to say "OK, I know how to find message-ids" (though I still think that it's much less helpful out of the box compared to an http URL).

-Peff