Re: [boost] What is it with boost and tinyurl?

From: Walter Landry (wlandry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-07-21 07:12:53

Miro Jurisic <macdev_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> It seems to me that boost developers are particularly enamored with
> tinyurl.  While I agree that there are cases when tinyurl is a good
> thing, I can't but think that in many cases where it's used on boost
> lists it does more harm than good.
> 
> Tinyurl (and similar services) discard valuable information from the URL. I 
> often use information in the URL itself to judge whether the topic being 
> discussed is of interest to me. 

I'd like to add that, of the half-dozen free/open software lists I
read, boost is the only list that uses tinyurl's.  Making boost more
or less dependent on tinyurl seems unnecessary.  In addition, someone
who is not mark may post a url like

  http://foo.com/~mark/new_algorithm.pdf

Later mark (not the original poster) moves their site to mark.com, so
the site moves to

  http://mark.com/new_algorithm.pdf

With tinyurl's, it is much harder or impossible to find the new page.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry_at_[hidden]