Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-secsh-scp-sftp-ssh-uri-00.txt

[Darren J Moffat <Darren.Moffat%Sun.COM@localhost>]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Simon Tatham wrote:

> (Unless you're mandating that the _server_ in the 'c:/' case must be
> capable of throwing away a leading slash? But that seems like a
> requirement on server behaviour as well as URI format, which is
> fairly serious remit creep...)

Keeping in mind that scp is really just the rcp protocol over the SSH
transport.  Since rcp is a historically a UNIX protocol it doesn't (at
least to me, but probably not to everyone) seem unreasonable that a
server providing access via rcp should do the work of mapping UNIX
style names to its style.  Isn't that the case with '/' vs '\' on
Windows anyway ?

How would one specify an scp URI that was accessing a resource mounted
from a remote Windows filesystem (IIRC double slashes are required).

Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> An alternative (which would confuse a different set of people) would
> be to always eat the / after then hostname-part of the URL, so for
> unix systems, you'd see URL's like:

> scp://user@hostname/.login    (referring to the .login in your home directory)
> scp://user@hostname//etc/passwd

Given the user@ part that actually seems reasonable, and it makes it similar
to the following cli syntax for scp(1):

	$ scp user@hostname:.login
	$ scp user@hostname:/etc/passwd

The double // requirement could be confusing in a case where "userinfo@"
isn't specified. For example:

 scp://hostname/etc/passwd or scp://hostname//etc/passwd

Based on the behaviour of http I would personally have expected these
to be equivalent, however they wouldn't necessarily be.  What is the username
on the remote host when "userinfo@" isn't specified (which is where the
home directory is inferred from).

-- 
Darren J Moffat