Comment by aboodman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aboodman | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the help everyone with this most important aspect of the system ;).

To clarify, we don't think of these specs as URLs. The part before the final double-colon is a URL. To parse one, you get the final double colon, and take everything to the left as a URL.

There's some info on the syntax here:

https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/spelling....

Though it's not presented as a formal grammar in that doc, our most important criteria for the syntax was:

  - unambiguousness
  - interacts well with the shell, since we frequently use these as part of command lines

> To clarify, we don't think of these specs as URLs.

But everyone else will because you are including the protocol, and at the end of the day, they are a uniform way of identifying a resource, so they are functionally URIs.

Otherwise, you should probably either conform to the HTTP(S) protocol spec or makeup your own, e.g. noms+http://dbinstance.noms.foo::database/dataset

SQLAlchemy and most DB URIs are good examples on how to do this. For example, you can connect to a MySQL database instance and give it a default namespace/schema/database.

Part of the issue here is the ambiguity between a database, a database instance/server/host, a dataset/table, a catalog/namespace/schema, and what all those words and concepts mean. There's little consensus across fields, because even if computer scientists say "Okay, this is what a dataset actually is", somebody, whether it's a biologist or a physicist, will throw up their arms in protest.

> To clarify, we don't think of these specs as URLs

That makes it a lot clearer. :). Looking forward to take noms for a spin soon.

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