Re: rssh.el interactions with ange-ftp/efs

Dear Nelson, On Fri, 15 Jan 1999 you wrote: There was a great deal of discussion of using the URL syntax for remote filenames accessed by EfS back when EFS was developed. The issue was whether we should stick to the ange-ftp syntax or move EFS to the URL syntax, which had just been introduced. After much debate, it was decided to stick to the the ange-ftp syntax because the URL syntax is not well suited to editing remote files. If memory serves me right, at the time, the Internet Engineering Draft that defined the URL syntax allowed for no way to specify the username that you wished to use to access the remote file. As well, it had no concept of remote relative paths. i.e. no analogue of /sandy＠foobar:xxx.tex meaning the file xxx.tex in my FTP home on foobar. This makes it very clumsy for the purpose of doing actual work on a remote machine. The URL syntax was really designed for the purpose of read access to remote resources, via the web, etc. EFS was designed for the purpose of doing editing on remote machines. Although, many people use it as an anonymous FTP interface (and it does do the job), that is not what it is optimized for. While I'm spouting history, this is also why EFS has never supported local caching of files like netscape. Code to do caching is easy to write for read access only. For write access, it's more complicated. This coupled with the fact that still many many FTP servers out there cannot be counted on the follow RFC 959 (making it hard to get reliable information about the remote file system) meant that I never really got caching code to work reliably in real world use. BTW, if you use EFS to access a remote apollo, it has code to make sure that the // will not be short circuited. This is part of the reason why EFS overloads expand-file-name. ...Sandy