[Directory-discuss] stable urls

[Karl Berry]

I just realized ...  The directory is used all over the web as a
reference for free software projects.  So I fervently hope we can keep
existing urls working.  Currently we have urls like
http://directory.fsf.org/project/emacs/ (with a trailing /, it always
redirect to that).

So, at a minimum, http://directory-dev.fsf.org/project/emacs
and http://directory-dev.fsf.org/project/emacs/
should redirect to http://directory-dev.fsf.org/wiki/emacs.
That should be a simple rewrite rule.

Not 100% critical, but still very helpful, would be to allow a trailing
/, so that http://directory-dev.fsf.org/wiki/emacs/ works as well as
../emacs without the /.  That should also be easily doable with
mod_rewrite.

IMHO Ideal, but harder to achieve as far as I can imagine, would be to
not change the urls at all, so that
http://directory-dev.fsf.org/project/emacs/ remains the visible url,
instead of introducing this new /wiki level.


And: orthogonal to this, but very important IMHO, is the automatic
upcasing that now happens: .../wiki/emacs -> .../wiki/Emacs.  How would
you feel about not doing this?  I see it as a big step backwards.

All our other package-related systems -- savannah, ftp.gnu.org, the
maintainers file, the existing directory, etc. -- have case-sensitive
and lowercase-by-default identifiers, as in emacs not Emacs.  I'm very
glad that at least .../emacs redirects instead of failing, but I think
it would be much better to have emacs be what's visible, too.  Capital-E
Emacs just introduces a new layer of confusion and ambiguity.

Displaying a capitalized form in the text is one thing, I don't have any
objection to that (not that I'm in favor of it, either), but using
gratuitious capitals in the canonical url is very troubling to me.

Thanks,
karl