Re: Nvu

On 24/10/2006, at 4:43 AM, web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

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 since
there's no standard for this format, Nvu has a problem... it needs code
that 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 FTP

server it's running.  Then it distills that into the various directory
listing formats (Unix, Windows, et al)

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

I found the following source file:

    netwerk/protocol/ftp/src/nsFtpConnectionThread.cpp

Your search was more successful than mine.

In that source there's a method named nsFtpState::R_syst() that appears to

be 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.");

And the rest of the code shows:
            NS_ASSERTION(0, "Server type list format unrecognized.");
            // Guessing causes crashes.
            // (Of course, the parsing code should be more robust...)

That's as far as I was able to get in 5 minutes. From here, I'm going to

try adding OS/400 just after MVS and recompile.  Of course, it'll only

work if the i5/OS FTP server is set to Unix directory format, and namefmt

1 by default, but it'll be a good test.

If that works, I can try to take

it a step further and make it insert the commands to change the directory

and 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 the
directory listing.  It's intended to be "human readable" so there's no

need to standardize it. Personally, I think that was a big mistake in the design of the protocol. It should've been given well-defined fields for each element returned in the directory listing, and if the client wants it

to 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 further

detail (which is standardized) or you get "human-readable output" that can

be in any format, but typically contains dates, file sizes, and other
information 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 up

with.

I just tried this and get build errors:
checking for GLIB - version >= 1.2.0... no
*** The glib-config script installed by GLIB could not be found
*** If GLIB was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in
*** your path, or set the GLIB_CONFIG environment variable to the
*** full path to glib-config.
checking for libIDL-config... no
checking for libIDL - version >= 0.6.3... no
*** The libIDL-config script installed by libIDL could not be found
*** If libIDL was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in
*** your path, or set the LIBIDL_CONFIG environment variable to the
*** full path to libIDL-config.
checking for orbit-config... no
configure: error: libIDL not found.
        libIDL 0.6.3 or higher is required.
*** Fix above errors and then restart with "make -f client.mk build"

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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