sftp bugs

[John A Meinel]

Robert Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 12:11 -0800, Robey Pointer wrote:
> 
>> Not necessarily.  I tried to explain this in an email yesterday but  
>> probably just confused the issue. :)
>>
>> Basically, all SFTP says is that the path can be absolute or  
>> relative.  It doesn't say relative to what.  OpenSSH chooses to make  
>> it relative to your home folder, because that's convenient, and it  
>> knows you have a home folder.  A dedicated standalone SFTP server may  
>> not be using unix shell accounts for authentication, so you may not  
>> even have a home folder.  It might make paths relative to your  
>> project folder, or an arbitrary folder that it thinks is convenient.
>>
>> It may be hard to imagine right now, since almost all SFTP servers  
>> are OpenSSH based, but I know of at least two all-python standalone  
>> SFTP servers, so in the future we're probably going to see more SFTP  
>> URLs where your authentication is not backed by a unix shell account  
>> or home folder.
> 
> That makes sense to me. So the question is:
> 
> is sftp://host//absolute/path
> or
> is sftp://host/absolute/path
> 
> more useful?
> 
> For HTTP, FTP, and File:// urls the latter syntax is used: the
> presumption is that all resources on the filesystem have the same
> location *regardless* of user credentials.
> 
> I think that this is easier to debug and easier to understand than URL's
> where the resource location randomly changes if the credentials change.

Well, how does the supermirror handle it? I could have sworn that it
gave you a different path depending on you username. So if you connected
as sftp://arch%ive-foo/cat--b--v@sourcecontrol.net/ it would put you at
the root of your project.
Which means that even with absolute paths, you still have a floating
root directory depending on username.

So your argument doesn't mean a lot to me.

In my head, it depends more where people are thinking to put their
stuff. I control my main server, so I tend to put things in the shared
location, thus:

sftp://myhost/srv/bzr/branches/

Now, some people might generally host their archives in their personal
web space, so they would do:

sftp://myhost/home/jameinel/public_html/bzr/branches/

And shortening that to:
sftp://myhost/public_html/bzr/branches/

Could be nice.

Also there is the tie-breaker that the IETF draft spec uses
sftp://host/relative/path
and
sftp://host/%2Fabsolute/path

The other thing I'm guessing is that they really did mean:
sftp://host//absolute/path
Because the little blurb I read made it sound like '/' was a reserved
character in the username/password/host fields (which it is) not in the
path portion.

John
=:->


> 
> Rob
> 


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