gnome-vfs passes remote URIs not confirming to RFC#1738

[dinoop thomas <dinoop thomas wipro com>]

Hi All,

Problem
-----------
The remote location URIs (ftp, smb, sftp) passed by gnome-vfs to 
applications such as staroffice,  mozilla , openoffice etc
does not confirm to the url standard defined in RFC#1738.

For example, try to open html file, say 'test.html' from a remote ftp 
location from nautilus.
We get an error dialog saying ,  '550 Failed to change directory'.

Root cause
--------------
According to RFC#1738, the URI passed should be of the following syntax.
//<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<url-path> where the url-path should 
be of the
form <cwd1>/<cwd2>/........../<cwdn>

Each of the <cwd> elements are supplied as argument to a CWD . Within a 
cwd component,
reserved characters such as '/', ';' should be encoded. 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

The  URL passed by vfs to mozilla is   
'ftp://user@<host>/home/test/test.html'
This results in the application trying to do a CWD to home after logging 
into /home/test which eventually fails.

According to RFC#1738 , this should be 
'ftp://user@<server>/%2Fhome/test/test.html',
where '/' is encoded as '%2F'. This would result in a change in 
directory to /home/test , which works fine.

But at the same time applications like gedit are able to process URIs 
passed by vfs of the form
ftp://user@<server>/home/test/test.txt though this doesn't comply to 
RFC#1738.

Can the gnome-vfs-uri code be changed so that it passes RFC#1738 
compliant URIs to applications?
Kindly give your comments.

Thanks n Regards
Dinoop Thomas