Re: Shorter archive URLs

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 12:52:46PM +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> We've been discussing shorting the archives URLs for some time, but never got
> around to actually doing it.
> 
> I've now got a preliminary patch going, that basically replaces the message-id
> portion of the URL with a sha1 hash (base64 encoded) of the message-id.
> 
> This brings the messageid part down to 28 characters. Looking at the current
> archives, that will make 92% of the URLs shorter and 6% longer than they are
> today. Looking at just 2018 and 2019, the number is 99% shorter and 0.5% longer
> (only 429 messages in total gets longer).
> 
> (The average messageid length has consistently increased from 39 characters in
> 1996, through 41 in 2006 and 51 in 2016 and on -- probably much thanks to
> gmail)
> 
> This means that instead of being:
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/
> CABUevEyqGVV-s1yXQBsTpoPDCHy79j-yDtJcucrPb9Hh4CFTNg%40mail.gmail.com
> 
> The url would be:
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/Z0oaTfo56bV4tke6-r_PKJstHF8=

It would be nice if I could easily compute the hash if I know the
message-id --- I assume I can just run it through sha1.  This would
allow me to shorten commit URLs, which would be a win for GMail.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

+ As you are, so once was I.  As I am, so you will be. +
+                      Ancient Roman grave inscription +