Re: Proposal: gopher.debian.org
"Jaldhar H. Vyas" <jaldhar@debian.org> writes:
> If scientists can clone extinct species we can bing gopher back from the
> dead. The advantages are many:
>
> 1. no "design", no "ecommerce" just pure information.
The other cool thing is that a gopher site can be browsed like a
filesystem. Konqueror is already doing this. There are some older
Gopher browsers that might as well; I can look into packaging them
up.
So yes, you could navigate to gopher.debian.org, browse through the
packages therein, double-click on one you like (or drag it to your
home directory), and have it install itself. Slick, eh?
Gopher was originally designed as a network-wide virtual
filesystem of sorts.... It's taken all these years for someone to
implement that nicely :-)
The other cool thing is that, unlike FTP, a gopher directory may
reference files from various servers all over the Internet in a
transparent fashion. So, say you drag a folder of "Steve's Favorite
Debs" to your machine -- it could fetch stuff from gohper.debian.org,
samosa, whatever.
Not bad, eh?
> 2. the gopher protocol is supported by major web browsers on all platforms
Except mozilla. Sigh. Grrowl. Fume.
> 3. Now GPLed.
Yup! I also have the UMN gopher client packaged.
> 4. That cool "retro" factor.
Yes, see gopher://quux.org/ :-) My gopher site with about 3 gigs of
stuff....
> If we can install gopherd on one of the servers, I'd be willing to work on
> this.
Same goes for me. Also, Slimer (Jon Nelson, of Boa fame) is writing a
Python-based gopherd that we may want to check out too.
It's worth thinking a bit about how we'd like to do it before we do,
since unlike FTP, gopher is machine-transparent (files in the
directory may or may not be on the same machine as the directory).
There might be some other possibilities there.
-- John
--
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> www.complete.org
Sr. Software Developer, Progeny Linux Systems, Inc. www.progenylinux.com
#include <std_disclaimer.h> <jgoerzen@progenylinux.com>
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