Re: Thank you for public-inbox!

From: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>
Date: Aug 30, 2018, 07:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20180830072049.dgsjn3537xzo6qcm@dcvr>
In-Reply-To: <20180830033000.GD665@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

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

Heh, one of the (unstated?) goals of public-inbox is to educate the users on how Message-IDs (and email in general) works. And to that end...

> 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.

....More than dreaming, our goal should be to BUILD such a world :> After all, it was my intense dislike of centralization which drew me to DVCS and git in the first place.

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> 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).

That would be awesome if somelike like <mid:ABC@XYZ> could be a standard and adopted (likewise with <git:$object_id>).

I haven't checked, but are there existing/similar RFCs? Surely somebody has tried to get <git:$object_id> adopted by now, right?