On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 8:15 PM, jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
If short URLs were so good, then one wouldn't need an 'after market' treatment to add them. I'll wait.
It's because it's pretty hard to detect this stuff "out of the box." We can try, but it's not always easy. I'd love to see this in the installer eventually, so the process of configuring it is easier.
The process is different for each webserver, which is why there's no "one-size-fits-all" answer to how to do this.
Plus, I might know how to maintain them now, but five years later will I still know? I'm not getting any younger.
I can't speak for nginx or IIS or lighttpd, but I know that Apache's mod_rewrite has been functioning the same way for a long time, so I can't imagine that configuration for that will change. On the MediaWiki side--we haven't changed the behavior of $wgArticlePath, $wgScriptPath and the rest in a very very long time (and I can't imagine we'd break it either).
Plus, what about all that spam in my mailbox about increasing the length of my URL without the need to see a URoLogist? It can't be all wrong.
Not everybody can figure it out for themselves. Having tools to simplify things are a Good Thing.
-Chad