On Mon Mar 15, 2021 at 6:01 PM EDT, brian m. carlson wrote: > But you can't find whether a URL is useful for a particular purpose in > general. For example, if I see an HTTPS URL, that tells me nothing > about the resources that one might find at that URL. > > In addition, it's possible that the data you want exists, but is not > suitable for you in whatever way (not in a language you understand, in > an unsuitable format, is illegal or offensive, etc.), or you are not > authorized to access it. You can't know any of this without making some > sort of request. > > All a URL can tell you is literally where a resource is located. Even > if we saw a URL that used the hypothetical https+git as the scheme, we > couldn't determine whether we could access the data, whether the data > even still exists, or, even if we knew all of those things, whether it > was using the smart or dumb protocol, without making a request. What we know is that we can pass it to git to deal with, and then git will determine the next steps. It will negotiate dumb or smart HTTP in-band, deal with errors that arise, and so on. It signals that git is the tool best equipped to deal with the situation, and without that we'd end up guessing. > So I don't think this is a thing we can do, simply because in general > URLs aren't suitable for sharing this kind of information. That's simply not true. They are quite capable at this task, and are fulfilling this duty for a wide varitety of applications today. I don't really understand the disconnect here. No, URLs are not magic, but they are perfectly sufficient for this use-case.
