Re: [Monotone-devel] url schemes

[Philipp Gröschler]

Markus Schiltknecht:
> As another, minor point, IMO the second is also easier to read and 
> understand. A good (but admittedly deprecated) example might be:
>
>   http://venge.net/net.venge.monotone
>
> Looks quite confusing to me, where as:
>
>   http://venge.net/branch/net.venge.monotone
>
> Makes the thing easier to understand. Especially for starters, I think.

Timothy Brownawell:
> There needs to be a clear separation between the db path and any
> parameters. http://host/path/to/app/followed/by/parameters can work for
> web apps because all processing of the URL happens on the server, which
> already knows do discard /path/to/app when looking for parameters. We
> can't do that, because the netsync client also needs to know the
> parameters.

Have it look like

  http://venge.net/branch?net.venge.monotone

and the parsing on client side should be fine. To stay with the widely 
known URL scheme, a '&' character would be needed for the addition of 
further parameters. As this would be a problem for CLI use, just 
encapsulate the URL in quotation marks. BASH and (T)CSH work fine with 
this, I just tested that. Try on your konsole if

  echo "http://www.xyz.org?abc&efg=1234";

is working, while

  echo "http://www.xyz.org?abc!efg";

should result in error.

I think the approach of only using slashes in the path of an URL is 
mostly used to obscur the structure of a web application. It makes it 
not very easy for the user to tell at which point there is code envolved 
(servlets, etc) or where there is a relative filesystem path, or 
whatever other resource you can guess of. But I am straying from the point.

If I correctly understood the recent discussion, my example above would 
imply the use of 'exclude' and 'include' parameters rather than using 
special characters. Anyway, the resulting URL would therefore be much 
longer to type, but as the reasoning for 'beginners' has already come 
up, a longer and also more verbose URL would be much better to 
understand. There would be less irritation ("Okay, I just want to do 
xyz, but how? Let's try if [....] works. Hmm, doesn't") and the scheme 
would be easier to learn, because known practices (HTTP, ...) could be 
applied.

Last week I had serious doubts in my senses, when some java RMI stuff I 
coded just wasn't getting to work. I tried a lot of examples, copied 
them 100% and followed each step accurately, but it didn't work. The 
reason was, the URL for the java.rmi.server.codebase was missing a 
trailing slash. Nowhere in any article I read was a single clue on this 
necessity. The enlightenment came late at night while reading some FAQ 
article which had been stuffed in the rearmost corner of the Sun 
website. So much for my story of beginners trouble with URLs. Please 
just don't let it happen with monotone ;-)

I'm almost sure I forgot something to write down here, but the text is 
already sufficiently vast.

Happy Easter!

Philipp