Re:Ask HN: Why are URNs not more popular?
by strogonoff on Saturday January 07, 2023 @10:20AM
(#34288773)
I’m not sure what you mean by “regenerated”. Sure, URNs will need to be updated to content-addressed ones, probably gradually, but you’d need to do the same to switch to a package manager.
I think package managers are in general a pretty good abstraction that can foster structured collaboration across independent (but communicating) parties. It can also enable standardization-via-usage rather than standardization-via-authority, which I think has always been all too common in the semantic data space.
Plow is at its core also very much based on content-addressing, where after the dependency resolution phase, we mostly deal with the hashes of the package contents rather than their name-based identifiers. That also has the nice side-effects that you could easily host a private artifact storage that retrieves the packages for on-premise usage. The public package index is also hosted in a git repository, so all the building blocks would be there that you can record the whole state of the system in a content-addressable manner if you wanted to.
[0]: https://github.com/rlay-project