[development] Re: [infrastructure] Drupal.org should have better URL aliases

[Gabor Hojtsy]

> Hence I suggest we ignore the hand-coded urlmapping for now. And focus on this 
> menu-mapping. After that, we can just use our current database mapping 
> (path.module), through this menu mechanism, to handle those few hand-edited 
> paths. Or is there anyone out there, who maintains over a few hundred 
> hand-edited path aliases? and if so, is that because you want to, or because 
> you lack a [book-structure-mapper|taxonomy-mapper|username-mapper] ?

We do use custom URL aliases, not autogenerated ones on Weblabor.hu,
because we would like to have short urls. A news item from lately:

  URL:   http://weblabor.hu/hirek/20051218/mysql2pgsql
  Title: MySQL kompatibilitási réteg készül PostreSQL-hez

The title translates to: MySQL compatibility layer in the works for
PostgreSQL. Note that the author targets Drupal too, but it is a
different question. :)

Now you see that if this title would be moved directly to the URL,

- some accented chars would get there, which should either be
  URL escaped (like it is the case of Albrecht Dürer for
  example: http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer),
  or autoreplaced with unaccented variants. The first looks ugly
  (and spam suspicious) in an email, the second can lead to
  funny meaning changes due to the missing accent.

- the URL would be overly long, or it would not catch the essence
  of the topic, if truncated

Note that we include the date and the 'hirek' (news) word in here to
better signal what this URL is about (the date and the 'hirek' prefix is
enforced on our interface).

This is not to completely oppose a functionally automatic alias system,
but to indicate that some people might need to have very different path
values (eg. for custom company needs, replacing an old site, translating
path values to some local language, etc).

Goba