F20 System Wide Change: Web Assets

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Miloslav Trmač <mitr at volny.cz> wrote:
> Minor comment: This copy of the text uses /assets ; the wiki page and
> the proposed policy uses both /assets and /_assets ; this should be
> cleared up.
>
> More importantly, is it OK to just take over a part of the server's
> URI namespace like this?  If we do so, users won't be able to remap
> the directory to something else without potentially breaking
> Fedora-packaged applications.  Are we satisfied enough that
> (presumably) /_assets will not collide with existing applications or
> installations?  (Yes, this is already written in the proposal.  I
> still thought it is worth highlighting to make absolutely sure we have
> this discussion, because changing the path would be very painful with
> the current proposal.)

I added the underscore based on the suggestion of the httpd maintainer
(in the discussion on the packaging list), who suggested "/.assets/"
or "/_packaged_assets/" or so.  (And sorry, I missed a couple spots
when changing it.)  I didn't like the latter because I would really
prefer to keep it short.  One of the things *I* really want from this
is the ability to just type "/_assets/jquery/jquery.min.js" while
developing instead of having to wget it every time or use an evil CDN
that logs everything.  Us programmers are lazy and shouldn't be forced
to type gigantic URLs.  ;-)

But "_assets/" does have the potential to clash a lot too.  So how
about "_sysassets/"?  It reinforces the point of the directory, it's
still pretty short, and seems to used nowhere else [1].

Note that most web apps that ship httpd configs already claim a chunk
of the URI namespace, so that part isn't anything new, and prior
JavaScript proposals actually called for keeping this tradition and
giving every JS library it's own directory.

-T.C.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22_sysassets%22