Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] New go.gentoo.org url shortener

[Joonas Niilola]

On 12/8/20 3:55 PM, Max Magorsch wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> the tl;dr is that I've set up a new url shortener which is available
> on https://go.gentoo.org/ currently. It can generate short links like
> 'go.gentoo.org/XXX' or you can create custom persistent links like
> 'go.gentoo.org/arzano/tyrian' or 'go.gentoo.org/infra/hashicorp'.
> Basically, I'm looking for some quick feedback whether you consider
> this as useful or don't think you would use it much, to decide whether
> it's worth offering this service.
>
> As mentioned the url-shortener is deployed on https://go.gentoo.org
> currently. The source code is available at [0]. It's only accessible
> by Gentoo developers using Gentoo SSO for the authentication. You can
> log in using your nickname and your ldap password. Basically two use
> cases are supported:
>
> 1) Just paste a link and get an automatically shortened url like
> 'go.gentoo.org/XXX'. This is pretty much the normal url shortener
> functionality.
>
> 2) You can paste a link and create a custom persistent link using a
> prefix like 'go.gentoo.org/$prefix/$custom'. Allowed prefixes are the
> nickname of the developer that is logged in or a project the developer
> is part of. Thus I for one could create links like
> 'go.gentoo.org/arzano/tyrian' or 'go.gentoo.org/infra/hashicorp'.
> However, I would e.g. not be able to create
> 'go.gentoo.org/qa/policy-guide' as I am not part of the qa project.
> Only members of the QA team could create that link. That's also the
> reason I've been coming up with this, as this way every developer /
> every project would be able to create custom persistent, nice / short
> links.
>
> However, please note that this is just a first beta version yet and
> it's not meant to be production-ready yet. Please feel free to test it
> though. In general, I'm looking for some feedback on whether you would
> be interested in the two functionalities to get a feeling whether it's
> worth spending time on this / offering this service at all.
> Also I would be especially interested whether you consider the second
> functionality as useful. Because if we just want the first
> functionality, we can simplify this and just use any of the
> url-shorteners that are already out there, instead of using the
> solution I have built.
>
> /M
>
> [0] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/sites/go-gentoo.git/
>
Hi,

well my first impressions are that there are few major issues why I
wouldn't use this:
 - for an URL shortener the final URL isn't really that short (there are
multiple alternatives),
 - not a CLI tool to handle this (yet at least),
 - login would be REQUIRED so people won't spread malicious links with
"gentoo.org" in it, or at least the accounts can be disabled.

Although I do like the idea of team-specific links, in the end I fear
there'd be many dead links and no one to clean/check those. So in the
documents we're better at referring to the original source.

-- juippis