Laine Stump writes:
> > I just installed the March 24th 1.2D snapshot (i386) on a disk and was
> > trying some things out. I found that the ftp client no longer works
> > properly with ange-ftp in emacs.

Brian Baird writes:
> I had to change ange-ftp so that is starts ftp with command line
> editing disabled and had to disable the progress bar stuff:
> 
> (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "-e"))
> (add-hook 'ange-ftp-process-startup-hook
>           '(lambda ()
> ;            (ange-ftp-raw-send-cmd proc "passive on")
>              (ange-ftp-raw-send-cmd proc "progress off")))
> 
> 
> With these changes, Emacs-19.34 ange-ftp works fine on a NetBSD/i386
> Mar 24 snapshot.

Thanks for the tip. I don't see this as a long term solution, though.
In particular, I login to my account from several different machines
running different OSes, and use the same .emacs file on all of them. It
simply is not practical to have extra options sent to the ftp client
when those options are not available on all platforms.


I hadn't paid much attention to the messages going by about enhancements
to the ftp client in the past, but now that it has hit me: I think that
behavior with the default options of ftp should be made to work properly
with ange-ftp. If that doesn't work, there will undoubtedly be countless
other applications calling the ftp client that won't work properly,
which will mean lots of headaches for lots of people in lots of
places. Although there is no RFC or other document describing what the
interface to ftp is, there is a general concensus of its behavior, it
is used by lots of scripts and other programs, and it should be
predictable - if any of the enhanced features of ftp get in the way,
they should be turned off by default and only come on when a particular
switch is given. If people want the enhanced behavior by default, let
ftp look at an environment variable called FTP_FLAGS or something to get
their desires. But *please* don't break existing applications with
non-backward compatible operation; that is just plain counter-productive.