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To: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: CD distribution layout vs FTP distribution layout. 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 08 Jul 1996 15:46:23 CDT."
             <199607082046.PAA23180@brasil.moneng.mei.com> 
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 1996 16:25:50 -0700
Message-ID: <22613.836868350@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org
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> Why, you don't like specifying a URL of
> 
> ftp://ftp/../../../../../../../some/path/name?
> 
> (my AMD setup causes AMD to translate to a temporary pathname 7 elements
> long)...
> 
> I'm tired of this too  :-)

There's only one problem.

Say I create a user and I point his home directory straight at the CD
(something which gets done a lot :-).  Its very nice to be able to say:

ftp://my.local.site/

As the URL and have it Just Work, assuming that I've gone to the
Options editor and entered the appropriate username and password.  It
also collapses all URL handling handily into one place since whether
the username is "ftp" or "joe", the pathname handling is the same.

The essential problem is with the URL, which also uses / chars for
separators.  Given an FTP username of joe, how do you tell that:

ftp://my.local.site/release/2.1.5

is /release/2.1.5 or ~joe/release/2.1.5?

Yes, I'm aware that you could say:

	ftp://my.local.site/~joe/2.1.5

But that would violate the principle of least surprise if you've
already set the username to joe. :-)

As you can see, it's not an immediately obvious decision or I'd have
changed the behavior long ago.

					Jordan