Temporary errors in transport layers (was Re: [Bug 28850] FTP transport: put: fails during push operation)

[Matthieu Moy]

Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers at digital-scurf.org> writes:

>> BTW, have you solved the problem of server closing the connection
>> after some time?
>
> I'm afraid I never found the answer and eventually gave up and life took
> over making me forget -- for which there is no excuse I know.
>
> Any chance you can investigate?

No time to spend on this right now. But a few ideas on how this should
work.

Reminder of the problem: my ISP (free.fr, one of the major ISP in
france) has an ftp server that closes the connection after some time
(not only idle time, just "after some time"), which raises a temporary
error in the ftp library.

I actually think this kind of errors should be managed by the
transport layer itself: the transport layer should declare a temporary
exception that transport implemetations could raise. When transport
catches this exception, it tries to reopen the connection. Probably a
counter should be added here, and a non-temporary exception should be
raised after, say, 2 retries.

In the case of my ftp error, the ftp transport layer should just catch
the exception in the ftp library, and raise the temporary exception
declared in the transport layer.

I have a test account on this ISP, I can provide login/password to
anyone interested through private email.

-- 
Matthieu