Re: file://host/location URLs

[Achim Gratz <Stromeko@nexgo.de>]

Daniel Colascione writes:
> All right, let me make a different proposal: by default, we'll treat file://
> URIs with non-localhost host parts as errors, since FTP is seldom
> appropriate.

It should go to a handler that determines the best protocol to use based
on what that authority part is.  If it doesn't find anything appropriate
it can still throw up its hands in despair.  And conditioning the whole
thing on whether the authority resolves to local or not may not be quite
appropriate either; I can be easily arranged so that one can't access a
file via the file system, but still get it via some other protocol.

> On Windows and Cygwin systems, we'll treat file://foo/bar/qux as
> file:///foo/bar/qux since the underlying OS understands how to access
> host foo.

The latter URI is malformed for many clients.  Last I looked you needed
five slashes for this to work consistently (two for the empty authority,
one for root, two for starting a UNC path).  But again, depending on
what the host part is, this may not be the correct thing to do (there
are files I can access over the network, but not via UNC path).

> File URI handling seems to be generally broken for local files anyway. Try
> (find-file "file://localhost/etc/passwd").

Yes, that needs fixing, too.


Regards,
Achim.
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