RE: presence of authority was Re: SFTP URI issues

["Salowey, Joe" <jsalowey%cisco.com@localhost>]

This ABNF is for the SSH URI which should not contain a non-empty path.
The deviation from the 3986 path was intended to describe this.  I think
the change is correct, but I could have missed something. The "sftp" URI
uses the path description from 3986. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Petch [mailto:nwnetworks%dial.pipex.com@localhost] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 3:37 AM
> To: Salowey, Joe; ietf-ssh%NetBSD.org@localhost
> Subject: presence of authority was Re: SFTP URI issues
> 
> Mmmm
> 
> I should have added to my previous reply that I never find 
> RFC3986 easy to
> understand, perhaps because it is not easy to understand:-(
> 
> In RFC3986 is the following
> hier-part     = "//" authority path-abempty
>                  / path-absolute
>                  / path-rootless
>                  / path-empty
> which means
>     authority path-abempty OR
>     path-absolute OR
>     path-rootless OR
>     path-empty
> while the I-D has
> hier-part     =  "//" authority ( path-empty / path-abempty )
> which means
>     authority path-empty OR
>     authority path-abempty
> Is this change intended?
> 
> Tom Petch
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Salowey, Joe" <jsalowey%cisco.com@localhost>
> To: <ietf-ssh%NetBSD.org@localhost>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 2:40 AM
> Subject: SFTP URI issues
> 
> 
> > Several issues have been raised in the past month over the SFTP URI.
> >
> > Issue #1: On the IETF list several people expressed concern that the
> > scheme name "sftp" might be confused with RFC 913 (Simple 
> FTP) or RFC
> > 2228/4217 (FTP security extensions using TLS).  While I think 913 is
> > historic and unlikely to cause confusion I believe there are
> > implementations of TLS FTP around.  I think there are 
> probably many more
> > implementations of sftp and many people would understand 
> that SFTP is
> > file transfer in SSH, but there is room for confusion.  We 
> could either
> > note the confusion and keep sftp or select some other 
> scheme name such
> > as sshftp and reserve sftp so no other protocol uses it.
> >
> > Issue #2: The current draft states that if you specify a 
> URL that begins
> > without a %2F (URL encoded /) it is relative to the home directory.
> > Several people have suggested that this is awkward and they 
> would rather
> > see
> >
> > A) A URL that beings without a %2f to be an absolute URL, and choose
> > another delimiter such as ~ to indicate a path relative to the home
> > directory.
> >
> > B) Allow / instead of %2F so sftp://joe%example.com@localhost/%2ffile becomes
> > sftp://joe%example.com@localhost//file
> >
> > I'm not sure B is legal URL encoding, but I think it may 
> work.  A seems
> > like it would work.
> >
> > Any Recommendations?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Joe
>