[gridsam-discuss] GridSAM news and gsiftp urls

[Justin B. <jb...@ec...>]

Hi All,

For those who don't know me, my name is Justin Bradley and I have  
taken over from Hugo Mills as the release manager for GridSAM.

I have now tagged version 2.0.2 in the sourceforge subversion  
repository.  This version contains all the main fixes and enhancements  
to date as well as the Globus status patch as supplied by Jos  
Koetsier.  I'll publicise builds for this over the coming days.

The second patch from Jos is still pending, the patch works as  
designed, but it has the effect of changing the default interpretation  
of the gsiftp urls.
These are the gsiftp urls as supplied in the JSDL files as used by  
GridSAM, when Globus is being used as a back end.
The change is that by default the path component is now interpreted as  
being an absolute file reference, whereas previously is was considered  
to be relative to the home directory of the user in question.

For example: gsiftp://machine.com/dir/file.txt is now interpreted as  
being /dir/file.txt rather than for example /home/user/dir/file.txt

We have a proposed change to make to this new behaviour, and would  
like feedback from the community on this.

This would be to revert the default to the way it was before, but  
ensure that a reference can explicitly be made absolute or relative,  
and these explicit styles would be encouraged.

gsiftp://machine.com/dir/file.txt - would be relative to the user's  
home directory
gsiftp://machine.com//dir/file.txt - would be an absolute reference,  
note the double slash
gsiftp://machine.com/~/dir/file.txt - would be a relative reference,  
as per the first case

This would be consistent with the suggestions from Bruno Harbulot, see:
http://blog.distributedmatter.net/?post/2006/12/08/gsiftp-URI-madness

Feedback appreciated,
	Justin
--
Justin Bradley
Design & Development Team Leader
j.b...@om...
OMII-UK
Suite 3235, Zepler Building (B59)
University of Southampton