[gopher] Hello, world!

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 10:15 PM, Nick Matavka
<n.theodore.matavka.files at gmail.com> wrote:
> I now believe that consensus *can* be established and therefore I re-submit
> the same link.  Please edit it and comment to the best of your ability.  I
> hope to actually submit this in the near future.
>
> http://piratepad.net/gopher


I've given the document a quick read, and made a few comments (and
proposals) that I think would fit nicely in an updated Gopher RFC.
They can be found at the following link:

    http://wiki.volution.ro/CiprianDorinCraciun/Notes/Public/Gopher/RfcUpdateProposal


(Disclaimer:  I didn't have internet access (or a computer) during the
"golden age" of Gopher, I'm not a frequent user of Gopher, neither do
I actively run a Gopher server.  However I did read Gopher's history,
and early web, and followed this mailing list since a few years back.
Moreover I just wrote a Go-based Gopher server, soon to be released,
and I do have a computer-science / research background.)


Regarding the text format of the proposal, I think it's quite hard to
follow, especially in the EtherPad coloured version.  Perhaps the
document can easily be changed to use RestructuredText, and then
exported to HTML for readability.  Moreover the sections (and / or
actual paragraphs) could be numbered to allow referencing to them
while commenting (without modifying the actual text).  (Obviously when
removing an entire paragraph its identifier should not be reused.)

Regarding the "workflow", perhaps using a versioning system like Git
or Mercurial would work better as the editors would have access to
proper diffs, history, and especially merges.  Moreover using
something like GitHub or BitBucket allows both "on-line" editing and
automatic rendering (of RestrucutredText) as HTML for reading.

(I could offer to solve the last two problems of formatting to
RestructuredText, splitting the text into one file per section, and
preparing a Git repository, plus the needed Make script to export the
document as HTML.)

Hope it helps,
Ciprian.