-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to gemini.hitchhiker-linux.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini;lang=en-US
Daniel Stenberg is a well known figure in the Free Software and Open Source worlds. Not only is he the author and maintainer of Curl, one of the world's most used pieces of software, he has somehow managed to make a living developing Curl pretty much exclusively. I have a lot of respect for the guy. He recently wrote a blog article about his response to a pull request which would add Gemini support to Curl. He wasn't exactly kind to Gemini. This has bothered a lot of folks probably more than it should.
Thrig.me had a great point for point rebuttal.
Then there was this great post from tjp
There has also been a lot of discussion on Bubble over this. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out also that there's a lot of discussion going on over at Hacker News, but I'm sure the reader can guess how intelligent that conversation is.
Here's the thing though. Why does this hit such a nerve?
That's just it. Frame his blog post from the standpoint of the maintainer of what is likely the most important piece of networking software in existence. He has rightly pointed out some ambiguities in the spec. What's interesting is that he makes sure to point out that none of his criticisms likely prevent it from being useful to it's community.
> This is not a protocol designed for the masses to replace anything at high volumes. That is of course totally fine and it can still serve its community perfectly fine. There seems to be interest enough to keep the protocol and ecosystem alive for the moment at least. Possibly for a long time into the future as well.
No, I think what he's saying and the recommendations he gives should be taken as "this is what would have to change for me to accept Gemini support into Curl". I don't completely agree with him, as the mere fact that we all seem to do just fine talking to each other tends to show that writing a client isn't really all that hard. But it's his piece of software, and his decision. Does that take anything away from Gemini? Probably not. I don't think that having Gemini in Curl would have given Gemini a shot in the arm or anything. I don't really think it would have even seen much use, to be perfectly honest. The spec is simple enough that one can put together a client in POSIX shell in just a few lines of code. In fact, here's the Makefile recipe for this capsule which hits Antenna with the feed after I publish a post.
publish: echo "$(submit_url)" | eval openssl s_client -connect warmedal.se:1965 -crlf \ -ign_eof -quiet
That's literally a one liner, with the exception that the var "submit_url" is defined elsewhere. So while curl might be nice it's not really that much better than what we already have.
Countless hours have been lost arguing with strangers on the internet. Don't read the comments on Hacker News, you'll just get angry. It's all the same arguments. People still complain about Gemtext, because it's similar to Markdown but just different enough. Why yes they are totally missing the point that it's a line based format which makes parsing orders of magnitude easier (and faster). Of course it would be a piss poor way to transfer html pages, what with requiring a new request for each piece of javascript/css/image. But we're not serving those things here.
It turns out that Gemini is a pretty decent protocol for serving plain text or Gemtext (which you are reading now). We are it's niche. A lot of us are wary of newcomers anyway, so it might even be seen as a blessing that Stenberg rejected the pull request (I know, that was absolutely gatekeeping there..).
Anyway, let's wrap things up. Just keep using Gemini and don't worry yourself so much over what the rest of the world thinks about it. Gemini attracts a lot of very different people, but most of us are a bit different from the masses. That's OK. Let them have the web. It's rotten, collapsing under it's own weight and it's hard to impossible to find meaningful communication there anymore. You can usually find that on Gemini, and that's why we're here. Nobody is coming for your capsules and you can go about your lives as before.
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