gemini+submit:// (was Re: Uploading Gemini content)

[Petite Abeille]

> On Jun 14, 2020, at 00:07, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:
> 
>>  I'll respond to the rest in another email, but I want to say that this is
>> a *brilliant* idea and could be done today. 
> 
> Thanks :)  I'm very pleased with it.

A bit like the 'Mode Switching' in NNTP of yore. 

Such mode switch -where client and server trade places- would be a very nice use of the protocol capabilities. Very cool idea. Like it.

Eddie Murphy would be proud [1].

If only NAT traversal was a solved problem though. Sigh. Where is my overlay network when I need it.

Meanwhile, perhaps a simple 'patch' command would do.

For example, to turn specification.gmi into specification-modified.gmi, one could issue a patch command transforming the former into the latter:

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi?data:text/x-patch...

Unfortunately, the 1024 bytes limit doesn't get  us very far. The diff itself is ~14K. ~5K compressed. Too big for one request.

Fossil delta format [2] is much more compact than diff -u, but still weights ~4K, 2K compressed. And this is not accounting for data: encoding overhead.

So, hmmm, 1024 bytes is quite a limiting factor if one must use only one request.

Perhaps this could be worked around using a sequence of requests, ala chunked transfer encoding [3]:

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi?data:... chunk1
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi?data:... chunk2
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi?data:... chunk3

The server would then reassemble the various parts and apply the delta.

A bit clunky, but workable :D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_Places
[2] https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/delta_format.wiki 
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding


P.S. FWIW, attached is the fossil delta between specification.gmi and specification-modified.gmi

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