Re: filexfer (was: Secure Shell WG: what's left?)

[Joseph Galbraith <galb-list%vandyke.com@localhost>]

der Mouse wrote:
> > > draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-09
> > > 	what can I say but *sigh*.
> > > 	the complexity of this draft seems to be increasing,
> > > 	due largely to differences in philosophy between posix/unix and
> > > 	not-posix/unix filesystems.
> > I prefer to think of this as adding functionality needed for
> > interoperability that was ignored in earlier versions of this draft.
>
> ...but in the process making it impossible for a moderately large class
> of systems to support more than ASCII under the protocol as specified
> at all.  (Strictly, they can't support even that much, but can probably
> get away with pretending.)

Are we talking about unicode filenames?

I really wish I understood your view point on this, but
I don't.

What is wrong with:

1. If the client does not turn off filename translation,
   the server should either:

   a. Use the true character set of the file as recorded by
      filesystem, if such exists.

   b. Pretend the user is sitting at a terminal.  As such,
      the terminal has an encoding it uses to display text.

      Typicallyd , this is controlleby the LC_CTYPE or LANG
      environment variables, though the method of determining
      this encoding may differ from OS implementation to OS
      implementation.

      The server should assume that all filenames are encoded
      such that they would display correctly on this 'pretend'
      terminal, and translate from that encoding to UTF-8.

   c. If the OS provides no mechanism for determining the user
      preferred encoding, but it is still possible for user to
      use different encodings for filenames, the server
      implementation itself may have to provide a way
      for the user to configure their preferred encoding.

   d. If said translation fails, the server should set
      SSH_FILEXFER_ATTR_FLAGS_TRANSLATION_ERR, and place
      the untranslated name in the attrib untranslated-name
      field.

2. If the client does turn off filename translation, the server
   simply sends rthe filename data as it reads it fom disk.

Thanks,

Joseph