SSH operations unfriendlyness

[Eric Hopper]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 11:45:43AM -0700, Brendan Cully wrote:
> >   ssh://user@host:~/22:1024
> 
> This looks really unintuitive to me. It violates URL rules and doesn't
> look like the rsh form either (which is of course insufficient on its
> own and the reason for silly variables like RSYNC_RSH and CVS_RSH).
> 
> In short, I don't think it's obvious to people who haven't read the
> directions, and it's disorienting to people familiar with the URL
> format.
> 
> If anything, I'd be for more verbose documentation about the URL form
> in the manual.

I agree.  Yes, in principle it's good for a tool to adapt to what users
expect, but if you carry that principle to its extreme, you end up with
perl in which every you could think of for expressing something works
but nobody knows what it means.

I think it's time for tools to start adopting a standard.  The current
standard is what gnome-vfs uses for ssh: URLs.  And it's the right
syntax for URLs.

I think that helpful messages explaining the URL syntax whenever a
certain class of errors is encountered would be good.  Accepting every
syntax will eventually result in a mishmash of incomprehensible garbage
as things are expanded and extended.  But educating users when they make
common mistakes will make for a much cleaner tool in the long run.  And
eventually, maybe all the other tools will start doing it the way that
fits well into some global scheme instead of each doing it their own
special way.

Have fun (if at all possible),
-- 
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  --- Thomas Jefferson
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."  -- Mark Twain
-- Eric Hopper (http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --
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