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

[Stefan]

>> The problem seems to be that dired-insert-directory wants to insert
>> the file xxx.txt into the remote dired buffer, and instructs tramp to
>> do so by doing a
>> 
>> insert-directory("xxx.txt" "--dired -ald" nil nil)
>> 
>> This is not handled correctly by tramp/ange-ftp however, as it tries to
>> cd to xxx.txt as if it was a directory.

> 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).


        Stefan