Re: [gridsam-discuss] GridSAM news and gsiftp urls

[Jos K. <jko...@st...>]

Hi.

The reason I used absolute URLs for GSIFTP is because that is the way  
most other modules in the Apache VFS work. I thought it would be  
confusing for users if SFTP and FTP use one URL scheme and GSIFTP  
would use another.

I think for GridSAM (and my own project 'Rapid') the best way forward  
would ideally be a standard-based one(i.e. according to section 3.2.2  
of RFC 1738). So URLs would be relative to the users' home directory  
unless the path starts with a %F2 character.

The problem is that that would probably mean changing the SFTP, FTP  
and GSIFTP modules to make them consistent.

SFTP and FTP do support an option 'setUserDirIsRoot', but I found this  
restricts a user to their home directory (and its subdirectories). So  
resolving 'sftp://my.host.ac.uk/..' will throw an exception. Neither  
SFTP or FTP can handle the '%F2' character.

Jos Koetsier


Quoting Justin Bradley <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



-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.