SSH operations unfriendlyness

[Ali Saidi]

On Jul 11, 2006, at 11:46 AM, Sébastien Pierre wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 18:32:55 +0300
> Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
>
>> It would be nice if the SSH URL syntax was more similar to the way  
>> SSH
>> treats remote path specifications, but I'm not sure if this is  
>> easy to
>> do (at least, not without making the exception too invasive for  
>> all URL
>> syntax parsing code), so I can live with `//' too :-)
>
> I suppose that the SSH URL syntax is set this way to enable easy
> parsing with Python urlparse module... but this wouldn't be  
> difficult to
> change this to "classic" SSH syntax.
>
> Is there anybody that would prefer the classic SSH syntax instead of
> the current one ?
>
>  -- Sébastien

I would. People have come to type http:// for HTTP urls, however with  
ssh people just expect it the normal user at host:path syntax. My  
optimal scheme would be:
1. If a colon doesn't exist in the path it's local
2. If a colon does exist and the path doesn't begin with http use ssh
3. Use http

If you read the documentation you'll notice that you need to specify  
absolute paths with //, however why special case what is normally the  
default behavior? shouldn't ~/ be the users home directory and /  
assumes the root? I don't particularly like the check the root  
directory and if it's not found then try the user's home directory  
because the same path could be present in both places and that would  
be extremely confusing.

Ali