IRC line limits are normally plenty for GitHub URLs—my vague memory (haven’t used IRC for quite some years) is that 512 was the proper wire format length limit,

IRC line limits are normally plenty for GitHub URLs—my vague memory (haven’t used IRC for quite some years) is that 512 was the proper wire format length limit, and I can’t remember what other guff there was in transmitting a message but less than 50 characters, so it should still be over 450 characters. Think I did encounter one server with a considerably lower limit once, maybe around 200 so it was probably 256, which is still oodles for all normal GitHub URLs. (Oh sure, you can exceed it easily enough if you want to, by defining ridiculously long ref names, or referring to a very long path.) But really, opaque short URLs are significantly worse than the full URL: you have to go to extra effort to create them, and extra effort to retrieve from them, and you’re adding an additional point of failure, and you can no longer just read the URL.