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

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-10-10 at 18:53 +0530, dinoop thomas wrote:
> 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.

I think it will be quite hard to support URIs like the RFC says in
gnome-vfs, because it really changes the semantics of GnomeVFSURIs which
will break applications using gnome-vfs. I haven't done a deep analysis
of this though.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an all-American gay cyborg plagued by the memory of his family's brutal 
murder. She's a beautiful thirtysomething vampire with the power to see death. 
They fight crime!