sftp oddities (urls)

[Martin Pool]

On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 11:55 -0800, Robey Pointer wrote:
> 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 know what you mean.  I don't think the sftp url draft spec has the
same kind of moral force that a well-established and widely implemented
RFC does.

> 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.

I agree with Robey and Jan.  I would like 

  sftp://host/absolute/path
  sftp://host/~/relative/path

Robert is correct that this makes it hard to access a directory in the
root called '~', but that's a very unusual case, and you can get there
with say sftp://host/./~/something.

> 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.

I think we should defer it until there *is* something obviously right.

-- 
Martin

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20060106/a0ab0080/attachment.pgp