sftp oddities (urls)

[Robey Pointer]

On 20 Dec 2005, at 5:29, Jeff Rose wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 12:27 +0100, Jan Hudec wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 11:54:22 +0100, Jeff Rose wrote:
>>>
>>> 1. Why does pushing and branching with sftp use an odd url that  
>>> doesn't
>>> correspond with what people already know about sftp?  Why not use a
>>> colon after the hostname, and then if you have a slash it goes to  
>>> the
>>
>> Because it does not work for URL. Colon after hostname is followed  
>> by port
>> there (It's not mandatory anywhere, so it /could/ be done -- but  
>> it would not
>> be more expectable).
>
> I don't know about official URL syntax, but I just wanted to let you
> know what someone "from the outside" thinks when they first use the
> tool.  If you are going to be using url's (er, addresses) that are
> different from tools people are familiar with then it is especially
> important to have really informative error messages and examples in
> help.  Since bzr supports pluggable transports maybe they could
> implement a method that spits out an example using their transport or
> something like that...?


FWIW, after the thread with the sftp url draft writers, I'm not  
especially convinced that they know what they're doing.  (They didn't  
even seem aware that there are existing uses of sftp urls!)  I agree  
with the recent consensus that we should drop their made-up syntax  
and just use default-absolute urls again.  We can make up something  
later to represent relative urls, but really, nobody ever really  
complained for all the years that arch didn't support relative sftp  
urls, so we may be trying to solve a non-problem.

As for what bzr should do with obvious non-urls like  
'robey at example.com:foo/bar/', I think it would be nice if it could  
guess what was intended and secretly convert into the right url,  
though there are some issues to be solved first (did I mean sftp or  
rsync?).  I think it's worth doing.

robey