Hello :)

Le ven. 6 mars 2026 à 20:52, Bob Proulx <[email protected]> a écrit :
>
> Laurent Lyaudet wrote:
> > I stumbled upon this URL:
> > https://https.git.savannah.gnu.org/git/
> > and was surprised by the double https.
>
> Ah, yes, well, I admit I struggled with the naming.  Naming of things
> is one of the great challenges.
>
>     git.git.savannah.gnu.org
>     https.git.savannah.gnu.org
>     http.git.savannah.gnu.org
>     gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org
>     cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org
>
I understand you need to rationalize the naming.
But you can see it's not perfect.
Both gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org
and https.git.savannah.gnu.org
needs to be consulted with https:// for example.
There is a mix between the protocol and the backend application.
Maybe
  gitpgit.git.savannah.gnu.org
  gitphttps.git.savannah.gnu.org
  gitphttp.git.savannah.gnu.org
  gitwebphttps.git.savannah.gnu.org
  cgitphttps.git.savannah.gnu.org
would have been more coherent?
But I did laugh when writing it ;) XD.

Since git is an insult in slang, it makes a lot of insults,
quite like "Bettelejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice" ;) XD.

> > Of course in a sane world, lexicographic order would have been respected,
> > and we would have:
> > https://org.gnu.savannah.git.https/git/
>
> The naming of DNS the domain name system dates back to the mid 1980s.
> It replaced the previous big long flat hosts.txt file.  At that time
> all host names needed to be uniquely named among everyone's names.  It
> was a fun time!  But DNS brought in hierarchical namespaces.  Whee!
> So much better that way.
Hierarchical order and lexicographical orders are very close.
With hierarchical order you take the number of tokens/parts (the depth
in the tree) into account before the order on each token/part.
With lexicographic order, you compare first the order on each token/part,
and when the prefix for one URL equals the second URL the shorter
number of parts comes first
(and inside each part, when the prefix of the first part equals the
whole second part
the shortest part comes first).
Both are a point of view on a tree structure.
And when you say hierarchical namespaces,
you mean that they have a tree structure.
Lexicographic DNS = LDNS would also have hierarchical namespaces with
your meaning.

>
> But anyway names in DNS names have always been the direction we have
> them.  It's a well namespace system.
>
Not the best possible in my opinion.
And the UTF-8 escaping syntax is nightmare... :)
I never understood why they created 150 ways of escaping things in
strings of just one.

> > and no security problem...
>
> Security problems?  Please say more!
>
Just to make someone think he's safe because he uses HTTPS,
and instead it is just HTTP, and someone makes a man in the middle
on the uncrypted dataflow in HTTP in the network,
and then people install, compile, execute compromised software
thinking it was secure free software coming from the FSF, etc.


> > But unfortunately, some people at the beginning of computer networks
> > (and systems) took always the worse option (by intent, by lack of 
> > knowledge?).
>
> You have to put yourself in the mindset of the 1980s when you were
> used to typing in the name of a host on your LAN as "saturn" and then
> wanting to go to a different foo on someone else's network over the
> WAN.  Maybe it could have been "com.example.saturn" but instead it
> makes sense due to TAB completion for example that it be something
> with the lsb part of the hostname "saturn" and then can do TAB
> completion to expand to "saturn.example.com" to get to the msb side of
> the FQDN.  So that's the way that was chosen.  And it allowed the
> creation of the world wide distributed database of DNS.  It's really a
> pretty well designed system.

Thanks, I didn't think at TAB completion.
After thinking, I think it falls in "Premature optimization is the
root of all evil."
Because with LDNS :
"com.example.saturn"
then since most TLD are only 3 characters,
you really doesn't lose much time by typing
"com.e",
then typing some more characters, you get the domain quite fast using
TAB if needed.

>     git clone --depth=1 git://git.git.savannah.gnu.org/coreutils.git
That's when reading that line that I thought about Beetlejuice joke ;) XD

> This was a long message so I will just close here and send it.
> Hopefully this was useful information.  Things are still actively
> being developed and improved so the above description will become
> outdated itself at some point.
>
> Bob
>

Thanks for your answers :)

Best regards,
    Laurent

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