Re: tramp/ange-ftp problem when copying into directory shown in dired buffer

[Michael Albinus]

Stefan <address@hidden> writes:

>> It reminds me that a similar problem has been reported months ago:
>> <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.tramp/1586>, 3rd article in
>> thread and following.
>
> Yes, this is due to my change of revision 1.33 (2002/05/20) which was
> introduced to work around the following problems IIRC:
>
> - in wuftpd, `ls -opts /foo/bar/.' returns an empty list (rather than an
>   error) if /foo/bar is not a directory.  So in order to discover whether
>   /foo/bar is a directory or a file, we try to cd to it.
>
> - in netbsd's ftpd, the `ls' command can only take one argument: either
>   `ls -opts' or `ls /foo/bar'.  So we pass the two args in two steps:
>   first `cd /foo/bar' then `ls -opts'.
>
> I.e. the current code poses problem for your insert-directory case (where
> you use insert-directory to insert a single file's data) with every ftpd
> servers, but removing my workaround will break ange-ftp completely
> (i.e. even the most basic operation like visiting file /foo/bar fails) for
> some ftpd servers.
>
> As for how to reconcile the two, it seems that the `mls' ftp command is the
> answer (that's why I've added it to etc/TODO).

I see your point. But just 2 questions:

- I don't know how long `mls' is available as FTP command (forgive my
  stupidness). Could it be that there are FTP servers which haven't
  implemented it?

- Given that both implementations available so far do break ange-ftp,
  shouldn't be the problem in admin/FOR-RELEASE?

>         Stefan

Best regards, Michael.