push to a windows ftp server

[Stefan Reichör]

Hi!

Since Gnu Arch is also not able to publish to that Microsoft FTP
service I asked for help there also.

I got two interesting responses from Jason McCarty:

> No, but a while back a had a problem that looks like the same root
> cause. This was with larch, however, not tla. I'll quote an old message
> of mine, written June 22, 2003 to the old arch-users at lists.fifthvision.net
> list, message-id 20030622232615.GA21388 at iup.edu :
>   [...]
>   I think this is because Microsoft's FTP server has a buggy NLST
>   command:
>     Client: NLST /bclg/wwwiup/{archives}/test
>     Server: /bclg/wwwiup/{archives}/test\=meta-info
>   First, it doesn't include dotfiles in its output. Second, it uses a
>   backslash as the final path delimiter.
>   [...]



> I ran tla (1.3) get against an empty valid archive on a microsoft FTP
> server ("Microsoft FTP Service (Version 5.0)") to see what FTP commands
> it used, then I used netcat to manually run all the same commands,
> adding the -a option to each NLST command.  Results:
>   tla: NLST /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp
>   response: /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp\=meta-info
>  
>   emulated: NLST -a /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp
>   response: .archive-version
>             =meta-info
>  
>   tla: NLST /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp/.archive-version
>   response:
>  
>   emulated: NLST -a /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp/.archive-version
>   response: .archive-version
>  
>   tla: NLST /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp/=meta-info
>   response: /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp/=meta-info\name
>  
>   emulated: NLST -a /bclg/wwwiup/testmsftp/=meta-info
>   response: name
>  
> I did a couple other tests too, not sure if they're relevant. Please
> excuse any misuse of terminology.  To summarize, given an empty
> directory as argument, NLST -a gives an empty response to the data
> connection. Given a nonexistent file, it writes "550 -a: The system
> cannot find the file specified." to the status connection. Given a
> nonempty directory, it writes the names of all files in the directory to
> the data connection without leading paths, separated by newline and
> carriage return. Given an existing file, it writes the name of the file
> to the data connection with no leading path.
>  
> Hopefully this is enough information for someone to add support for
> MSFTP, or to decide it's too much trouble (as I did!). Oh, and NcFTP
> appears to parse the ("ls -l"-like) results of LIST, for which MSFTP
> appears to list all files. Probably not the route tla wants to go.
>  
> I didn't find the -a option to NLST documented anywhere with regards to
> MSFTP, only other servers.

I am not sure, if this information is useful for bzr as well.

Stefan.