Re: A future for the SSH File Transfer Protocol?

[Simon Tatham <anakin%pobox.com@localhost>]

"Joseph Galbraith" <galb-list%vandyke.com@localhost> wrote:

> I'm definitely interested in this.  Can you repost your proposal?

Certainly. It's available as a text file from

  http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/ssh/draft-sftp-userdb-00.txt

> I would actually like to eliminate the long listing format (on a per
> file basis, I think it adds several hundred percent overhead... on a
> directory with several hundred files in it, over a slow link, this
> is a not insignificant overhead.)

Hmm, hadn't thought of that. And compression will only cut it down
by so much...

> But to do so, we need to provide a way for the client to map uid/gid
> to names.

... which would be much more bandwidth-efficient because you only
need do the mapping once for each uid mentioned, and in the average
directory listing there are many more files than uids. Nice idea.

(On the other hand, waiting for the file data to be returned and
then looking up the uids will cost you another round trip. If your
link is high-bandwidth but high-latency, this approach might lose!)

> I'd be tempted to suggest that UIDs be defined as
>     string identifier
> which would be an opaque data structure to the client.

But suitable for showing to the user, presumably? The ghastly WinNT
security IDs wouldn't be something the average user wanted to see
polluting their file listing :-)

Cheers,
Simon
-- 
Simon Tatham         "A cynic is a person who smells flowers and
<anakin%pobox.com@localhost>    immediately looks around for a coffin."