Re: Shorter archive URLs

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 6:35 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> > This means that instead of being:
> >
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CABUevEyqGVV-s1yXQBsTpoPDCHy79j-yDtJcucrPb9Hh4CFTNg%40mail.gmail.com
> > The url would be:
> > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/Z0oaTfo56bV4tke6-r_PKJstHF8=
>
> FWIW, I don't care for that one bit. Yeah, message IDs are pretty
> opaque in many cases, but at least they're not designed and built to
> be opaque. An example of what would be lost is the ability to find
> a message given one of these URLs in any other archive, such as one's
> personal mail archive. (Unless one sets up a mapping table to match
> this transform, which would be a big PITA.)
>

You mean going from an URL into actually finding the message, without
looking at the actual archives site? Yeah, that wouldn't work. With access
to the website, the message-id is right there of course.

But that's true, that's definitely a "lost feature" I didn't think of.

> Any access to the old message-id based URLs would automatically receive a
> > permanent redirect to the new ones.
>
> If you remove the ability to find a message in the archive from its
> original message ID, I will be REALLY unhappy, because that will break
> lookups in the other direction (ie, given a message in my local files,
> go find it --- and its thread --- in the PG archives).
>

Oh, we will absolutely not do that. There's a reason we're still keeping
redirects in place for the old style archives URL, which we stopped using
in 2012...

On the whole I don't see any good reason to change this.
>

It is something that's fairly frequently requested, because they look bad.
For one thing, it's regularly mentioned when discussion commit messages,
because the "discussions:" links tend to wrap...

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>