GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 86280
gnome-vfs ftp doesn't connect to some ftp servers (ex. ftp://www.lvmi.lt)
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Nautilus and gnome-commander doesn't connect to some ftp servers (ex. ftp://www.lvmi.lt) with gftp there are no problems. I think problem is in gnome-vfs
FTP is an awful protocol. Theres basically no useful standard directory listing format thats both human readable and parsable. In GnomeVFS we have a fairly flexible parser for unix-ls-like responses. Unfortunately your server is an NT server that gives responses like this: 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. 01-23-02 06:42PM <DIR> incoming 05-12-99 09:44AM <DIR> STDUOM 226 Transfer complete. Now ftp.microsoft.com (which appears to be running the same ftp server as www.lvmi.lt) returns responses like this: 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Feb 13 2001 bussys dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 May 21 2001 deskapps dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Apr 20 2001 developr dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Feb 25 2000 kbhelp dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Apr 19 2:36 misc dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Jun 11 13:55 misc1 dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Feb 25 2000 peropsys dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Jan 2 2001 products dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Sep 21 2000 reskit dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Feb 25 2000 services dr-xr-xr-x 1 owner group 0 Feb 25 2000 softlib 226 Transfer complete. which gnome-vfs can deal with. I'm not sure what the right answer is - I'm not going to hack on the ls parser to support every ftp server out there - thats probably impossible and even if its not its going to take far too long. The reason that programs like gftp can deal with this wider variety of ls formats is that they're not trying to extract as much information from the server as we need for gnome-vfs (where we're trying to present a posix-like API to a filesystem). If you have the time and energy to develop a patch that will let gnome-vfs parse this other directory format (without breaking other sites of course) then I'll certainly accept that - otherwise I think this will just stay a limitation of gnome-vfs :(