[darcs-users] Still trying to debug FTP...

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2005 at 08:39:24PM -0800, Dave Roberts wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-01-29 at 21:31 -0500, Michael Conrad wrote:
> > On Saturday, January 29, 2005 9:04 PM, Dave Roberts wrote:
> > 
> > > Okay, so earlier today I got get/pulls working just fine. Now, I'm
> > > having trouble getting push working. I have a repository on my
> > > Windows machine with an update. I would like to push that back to the
> > > repository from which I originally did a get. I tried a simple "darcs
> > > push" and that resulted in a message telling me that I needed to set
> > > DARCS_APPLY_FTP.
> > 
> > Actually, I'm pretty sure that push won't work through ftp.  One thing
> > that the manual perhaps ought to emphasize is that in order to push,
> > there must be a working copy of darcs on the other end, and you must be
> > using a protocol that allows you to execute darcs on the other end.
> 
> Ah. Okay. I get it. But then if that's the case, why the DARCS_APPLY_FTP
> variable at all? I mean, if you can't use FTP for push, then I feel like
> I got suckered by darcs into even fiddling around with this. Wouldn't it
> have been simpler to print an error message saying, "FTP is not supported
> for push," rather than, "To push using FTP, set the DARCS_APPLY_FTP
> environment variable" ???

Agreed.  I've just made the error message more friendly.  It now says 

Fail: Pushing to ftp URLs is not supported.
You may be able to hack this to work using DARCS_APPLY_FTP

The latter is strictly speaking true: it there were a buffer overflow bug
in the ftp server, you might be able to write a client that would execute
darcs apply on the server... :)
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net