Re: [PATCH 0/1] Rewrite /hurd/symlink on top of trivfs OFF TOPIC PRAISE

[jbranso]

July 29, 2021 7:45 AM, "Sergey Bugaev" <bugaevc@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 11:25 PM Sergey Bugaev <bugaevc@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 10:39 PM <jbranso@dismail.de> wrote:
>> It would be cool to have a gemini translator. It would only take a few 100
>> lines of code.
>> 
>> Oh yes, a Gemini translator actually sounds like a perfect exercise!
>> It's not as simple as /hurd/hello or /dev/yes, but still simple
>> enough, and would be actually useful for the end users.
> 
> Thinking about it further,
> 
> while it's true that you should be able to write a very simple
> trivfs-based Gemini translator that would basically do a request for
> each open and let the client read the response body,
> 
> for a more serious, solid Gemini translator you'd want much more than
> that. In particular, you'd want the ability to talk about directories
> as filesystem nodes even if there's no document at that URL. So for
> instance,
> 
> $ settrans gemini: /hypothetical/gemini
> $ cat gemini://example.com/foo/bar/hello
> Hello
> # You'd also want this to work:
> $ cd gemini://example.com/foo
> $ cat bar/hello
> Hello
> # ...even if there's nothing (error code 51) at gemini://example.com/foo

That would be super cool!

> Ideally, cd'ing into a directory would not even cause a network
> request, only trying to read a file would. Moreover, you'd want ls(1)
> to work, at least somewhat. We could learn a trick from httpfs here:
> when asked to list the contents of a directory, fetch the page and
> collect links that point to pages inside the directory. For instance,
> gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/ contains a bunch of links to its
> subpages, which we would parse out and display as directory entries.
> Thankfully, Hurd fully supports treating a single node as both a
> directory and a readable file.

I wonder if httpfs supports "sitemap.txt" or "sitemap.xml".  That would
probably be better.
 
> I think this is all implementable, but would require using netfs,
> probably overriding netfs_S_dir_lookup (), and quite a bit more than a
> few hundred lines of code. :|

ahaha.  Someday.  :)

> Sergey