Beaker: Workspace URL Concerns

[webdesserts]

Beaker version: v0.8 pre-release.2

As a continuation of the discussion we had in irc. I was a bit confused when I found out that my workspace url was workspace://dusty-shop/. As you said, this dusty-shop url is auto-generated and is intended as a fun way of naming your workspaces. Some of the concerns with this workspace naming scheme were:

1. Will people want to rename the workspace?
2. Rather than act as an easy way to remember the workspace, will this just be "something else to remember"?
3. Because it looks so much like a normal url, will people try to share it?

One alternative would be to use workspace://${dat_hash} instead. This has the advantage that if it is shared, the receiver of the shared url could at least be redirected to a view of the site's files (given it has enough peers).

This issue is intended as a place to continue that discussion

[pmario]

1. Will people want to rename the workspace?

definitely

[pmario]

... One alternative would be to use workspace://${dat_hash} instead.

:/ Then the local workspace is "as unfriendly" as the dat hash. ... I personally prefer a "friendly" URL

dusty-shop is much easier to remember as a dat-hash

[taravancil]

1. will people want to rename the workspace?

We actually had this tool at one point. I forgot why we took it out, but we'll re-instate it. Super easy to do.

1. Rather than act as an easy way to remember the workspace, will this just be "something else to remember"?

This is still unclear to me. This question is a large part of why we put a beta release out, because we want to get a better sense of how the workspace tool feels to people who haven't been thinking about it for months :smile:

[taravancil]

Update: I just added a tool in the library settings tab to edit the workspace name

[davidar]

Looks like the input needs to be validated - if you enter a name with fullstops the change is accepted, but next time you go to the library page the content of all of the tabs is replaced with an "Error: Invalid workspace name" message (making it impossible to fix from the UI).

[pmario]

Especially for windows .dirname may be a problem. ...

[despens]

I guess I am not understanding why there is a workspace URL. It seems like in workspace mode, the DatArchive javascript object is not available as the site is not served via the dat protocol. This makes it hard to debug scripts using this without committing every time after correcting a typo. Maybe I'm using it wrongly? :thinking:

Re auto-generated names: what can sound like a fun name in most cases can appear problematic depending on the dataset. For example dusty-shop is maybe not the right choice for a dataset containing information on workplace safety in the textile industry. As a less grave case, I just got "quiet-spoon" for a project that works sound, do it doesn't exactly help me to identify the right workspace :wink: Couldn't the workspace URL be the name of the dataset's directory within Sites, since that will be canonized and unique due to filesystem constraints?

[pfrazee]

@despens We ended up agreeing that workspace URLs were hard to understand, and we decided to remove them entirely https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/pull/954. I think we'll get this out as a new beta this week.

I made a video to explain the changes here

Closing this issue!