Re: Specifying file names in SSH File Transfer Protocol

[Darren Moffat <Darren.Moffat%eng.sun.com@localhost>]

I don't really like the suggestion of breaking the path and filename
up into components.  This is basically what NFSv2 did, when WebNFS was
added to NFSv3 (client RFC 2054 and server RFC 2055) they went to
a mechanism more like what sftp has today (See section 6 in RFC 2054).

If I understand what was being proposed it would also still be in a single
packet rather than the multiple round trips that NFS had until multi-component 
lookup arrived.

Exactly what problem does the current filename mechanism pose ?
	a) As far as the over the wire protocol is concerned ?
	b) For implementors of clients ?
	c) For implementors of servers ?
	d) Most importantly for users ?

There are already implementations of the protocol that work between
Windows and UNIX platforms and they use different separators natively.
	
Adding the complexity of ASN.1 is going to hurt adoption of the
protocol.  Also remember that this stuff is already deployed and being
actively used by a large number of people so making massive changes like
switching to ASN.1 probably isn't a good idea.


Personally I've been using WebNFS over SSH rather than sftp recently,
but that isn't available to everyone (AFAIK Solaris has the only WebNFS
server but there are plugins for the nfs URL in some on Solaris based
web browsers.

--
Darren J Moffat