Re: Nvu -- WEB400

Hello,

I initially thought this might be caused by the default naming format
but I have my systems set to use the Unix listing format and naming
format so I installed the Mac version of Nvu and got the same stupid
error.

It is due to the format of the directory list (not naming.) And sincethere's no standard for this format, Nvu has a problem... it needs codethat understands every possible format on earth :)

The developers therefore have code to understand the most common formats.They send the SYST command to the FTP server, and it tells them which FTPserver it's running. Then it distills that into the various directorylisting formats (Unix, Windows, et al)

It took me about 5 minutes to find this out by first using Ethereal todiscover that it's using the SYST command to check the server type, andthen using GREP to search for the SYST command in the source code.


I found the following source file:

   netwerk/protocol/ftp/src/nsFtpConnectionThread.cpp

In that source there's a method named nsFtpState::R_syst() that appears tobe where the response is coming from. It does this:


FTP_STATE
nsFtpState::R_syst() {
    if (mResponseCode/100 == 2) {
        if (( mResponseMsg.Find("L8") > -1) ||
            ( mResponseMsg.Find("UNIX") > -1) ||
            ( mResponseMsg.Find("BSD") > -1) ||
            ( mResponseMsg.Find("MACOS Peter's Server") > -1) ||
            ( mResponseMsg.Find("MVS") > -1) ||
            ( mResponseMsg.Find("OS/390") > -1))
        {
            mServerType = FTP_UNIX_TYPE;
        }
        else if ( ( mResponseMsg.Find("WIN32", PR_TRUE) > -1) ||
                  ( mResponseMsg.Find("windows", PR_TRUE) > -1) )
        {
            mServerType = FTP_NT_TYPE;
        }
        else if ( mResponseMsg.Find("OS/2", PR_TRUE) > -1)
        {
            mServerType = FTP_OS2_TYPE;
        }
        else if ( mResponseMsg.Find("VMS", PR_TRUE) > -1)
        {
            mServerType = FTP_VMS_TYPE;
        }
        else
        {
            NS_ASSERTION(0, "Server type list format unrecognized.");

That's as far as I was able to get in 5 minutes. From here, I'm going totry adding OS/400 just after MVS and recompile. Of course, it'll onlywork if the i5/OS FTP server is set to Unix directory format, and namefmt1 by default, but it'll be a good test. If that works, I can try to takeit a step further and make it insert the commands to change the directoryand name format on-the-fly.

Rather stupid of Nvu because FTP is FTP. Although FTP servers usually
have extras the lowest common denominator is the same. If they don't
recognise the server they should just presume Unix and carry on.

First of all... there's absolutely no standard for the format of thedirectory listing. It's intended to be "human readable" so there's noneed to standardize it. Personally, I think that was a big mistake in thedesign of the protocol. It should've been given well-defined fields foreach element returned in the directory listing, and if the client wants itto be nice for a person to read, it can format it appropriately.

But as it is, you either get one filename per line without any furtherdetail (which is standardized) or you get "human-readable output" that canbe in any format, but typically contains dates, file sizes, and otherinformation that you can't get from the "just filenames" format.

Anyway, I'll add OS/400 and recompile and let the list know what I come upwith.