Re: [dev] paste_AT_

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2015 17:26:28 +0100

Greetings.

On Wed, 04 Nov 2015 17:26:28 +0100 Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Good morning 20h,
>
> I do like the idea of having a paste recording. But I don't like the
> idea of making it mailinglist based. That sucks. You will end up using
> a mail archiver to look through your paste history? Sounds terrible to
> me.

Well, the mail archiver could be improved. But actually, how to handle
e‐mail is on the user’s side, not the server side. This is what I think
is the difference to the web based solutions: No centralisation of the
storage. This will prevent the new Google paradigma of universal search,
but there should be more responsibility on the users side too. And we
get the mail features for free: Discussions, threads, proper MIME encod‐
ing, mail reprocessing etc.

What I imagined was some place where you send in something that people
might be interested in:

        * texts
        * complex shell commands doing something interesting
                * like commandlinefu but without a web interface
        * error messages
                * mailing list comments on problems
        * short applications / scripts doing something which you won't
          need a complete project for

I consider e‐mail to be more suckless than the web, that’s why I’d pro‐
pose a mail solution. The possibilities of a sane subset of e‐mail
haven’t been used yet. Ugly GUI MUAs are wasting our time and make it
seem terrible to use e‐mail. But the problem is like in the web: The
clients (browsers) suck and backwards compatibility (Microsoft exten‐
sions) keep you from exploring the mail world further. In e‐mail we at
least have the chance that there’s no dynamic language which enforced
some VM and it’s available everywhere.

Doing it over gopher would be the same like a web pasting service.


> Instead I would suggest to develop a paste-server (could be done via
> udp) that can be used to store paste's for a given arbitrary prefix
> (pick what you want as key for such a paste list).
>
> Then you'd need a paste client that performes a new "paste" for the
> prefix given (or compiled into your paste client due to a config.h
> setup).

This is just setting up a web paste service (like other proposals).
There wouldn’t be something new. It’s easily done by serving hash‐based
files in a directory via HTTP.

> Using the same prefix would allow collaborating on a certain paste list.

As said, this is for free in a mailinglist, without inventing a new in‐
frastrucutre.

Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann

"All our literature and art are for the masses of the people, and in the
first place for the workers, peasants and soldiers; they are created for
the workers, peasants and soldiers and are for their use."
     ‐‐Mao Tse Tung ("Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art"
(May 1942), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 84.*)
Received on Wed Nov 04 2015 - 17:26:28 CET