SSH operations unfriendlyness

Sébastien Pierre sebastien at xprima.com
Tue Jul 11 19:25:55 UTC 2006


On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:03:52 +0200
Aurelien Jacobs <aurel at gnuage.org> wrote:

> >   ssh://user@host:1024      would be directory ~/1024 on host
> >   ssh://user@host:22:1024   would be directory ~/1024 on host
> >   ssh://user@host:22:/1024  would be directory /1024  on host
> 
> It is a very unintuitive syntax !!
> It starts as an url and ends somewhat similar to the openssh syntax.
> Very unexpected !

This is not what other people seem to have noticed, and if you trim
the leading 'ssh://' prefix, you have exactly the same scheme as the
one used in SSH.  

Could you detail the reasons why you find it unintuitive ?
Besides, the scheme I proposer would still be a proper URL (see
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt, section "2.1. The main parts of
URLs").

> > if some cases, where someone has a directory named '22:1024':
> Well, you even point some ambiguous cases.

This is the only ambiguous case, and I shown how to disambiguate it.
Maybe you had another case in mind ?

> It's more than a disambiguating prefix, it's an URL starter mark.
> Users expect the following to be an URL.

See above link.

> I don't understand what's ambiguous with standard URL scheme:
> 
>   protocol://[user[:password]@]host[:port]/[path]
> 
> Note that the / after the host is *not* part of the path !
> As expected, path is relative, except if it starts with a / (which
> means 2 consectutive /, yes). That's perfectly intuitive for me.

The usability problem lies in the /[path] part of the scheme, which
is not structured as expected. As you point out, the problematic part
comes from the path interpretation.

Hopes this clarifies the problem,

 -- Sébastien




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