Re: Nvu

[web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

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

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.");

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.