Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 18:38:22 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: CD distribution layout vs FTP distribution layout. Message-ID: <199607082338.SAA23417@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <22613.836868350@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jul 8, 96 04:25:50 pm
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> > 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. Having understood this fundamental problem, I chose long ago not to whine about it, and have patiently tapped in my 7 ../ 's to do dozens of loads of my custom FreeBSD images here. However, since we are visiting this topic, and you are very intimate with this code, let me ask you this: I assume something parses up the URL format. I would think it would be possible to attempt intelligent chdir's to try to figure out what was meant... or, perhaps simpler yet, in the case where a first access attempt failed, perhaps a "cd /" could be done and the attempt retried.. How hard would it be to add a minimal amount of intelligence to the procedure? ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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