[net] non-English FTP sites - the continuing saga

[Steve Cohen <sc...@javactivity.org>]

We get these occasional requests that commons-net support ftp servers 
with non-English dates.  I've created some functionality to implement 
this.  I want to give it some real world testing.

Ah, there's the rub, however.  You can't find these sites.  They aren't 
publicly accessible.  I know.  I've harangued on this list, on 
jakarta-general.  No one can point me at such a site.  One person 
suggested the Apache mirrors.  A nice idea, but --- Ha! I looked and 
looked.  Any site run by/for software engineers is going to follow the 
standard - American English.  Most software engineers know enough 
English to survive.  I went further.  I started googling for all sorts 
of things "ftp francais", "ftp okt", etc.  I pored through the 
listings.  Maybe 1 out of 10 shows me a real ftp site, which, once I log 
on anonymously shows me the dates - in standard English!  It seems that 
the only people who are customizing their FTP sites to work that way are 
probably catering to non-technical users who might not be so 
English-friendly.  But these must be typically private FTP sites.

OK, thinks me.  I'll create my own stinking FTP server for testing.  I 
have VMware on my linux box. Easy enough to install an old redhat (9.0+ 
no longer supports FTP but 8.0 does) under vmware.  Configured it to be 
French.  Got vsftpd running easily enough.  Of course, I didn't think 
that would work, since none of the European sites I'd been accessing 
were in anything other than English on the FTP timestamps.  And that's 
what I got, too.  But I thought there must be a configuration option for 
the server daemon to make this happen, because as we know, there are 
SOME such sites.  But I couldn't find one. 

OK, so apparently vsftpd does not support the i18n feature.  Does anyone 
know of an ftp server that does?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: general-help@jakarta.apache.org

Re: [net] non-English FTP sites - the continuing saga

[Steve Cohen <sc...@javactivity.org>]

robert burrell donkin wrote:

> hi steve
> 
> may i suggest that you post a (concise) request for help on community?
> 
> - robert
> 

Robert, I have.  I posted earlier on this subject, much more concisely.
    (See attached) I had one reply which tried to be helpful but wasn't.

Here is the conclusion I have come to after looking at manuals for all
the common FTP server daemons all my googling in recent days on this
subject.  I have no confirmation of this but take it for what it's worth.

In the past, ftp servers running on unix systems actually called ls to
do their listings.  ls is, of course,  locale-respecting.  Modern ftp
servers (used by almost all serious sites today) do not use ls, nor do
they offer locale-specific listing formats.  Possibly by building them
from source, one might be able to achieve this, but why?  Since software
is increasingly international, having a "non-standard" appearance is a
negative, not a positive.  (An interesting reverse twist on i18n).

The few sites on which we've had these complaints, then, I suppose, are
running older ftp daemons, that do use ls to format listings.

Steve

Re: [net] non-English FTP sites - the continuing saga

[robert burrell donkin <ro...@blueyonder.co.uk>]

hi steve

may i suggest that you post a (concise) request for help on community?

- robert

On 6 Jan 2005, at 03:16, Steve Cohen wrote:

> We get these occasional requests that commons-net support ftp servers 
> with non-English dates.  I've created some functionality to implement 
> this.  I want to give it some real world testing.
>
> Ah, there's the rub, however.  You can't find these sites.  They 
> aren't publicly accessible.  I know.  I've harangued on this list, on 
> jakarta-general.  No one can point me at such a site.  One person 
> suggested the Apache mirrors.  A nice idea, but --- Ha! I looked and 
> looked.  Any site run by/for software engineers is going to follow the 
> standard - American English.  Most software engineers know enough 
> English to survive.  I went further.  I started googling for all sorts 
> of things "ftp francais", "ftp okt", etc.  I pored through the 
> listings.  Maybe 1 out of 10 shows me a real ftp site, which, once I 
> log on anonymously shows me the dates - in standard English!  It seems 
> that the only people who are customizing their FTP sites to work that 
> way are probably catering to non-technical users who might not be so 
> English-friendly.  But these must be typically private FTP sites.
>
> OK, thinks me.  I'll create my own stinking FTP server for testing.  I 
> have VMware on my linux box. Easy enough to install an old redhat 
> (9.0+ no longer supports FTP but 8.0 does) under vmware.  Configured 
> it to be French.  Got vsftpd running easily enough.  Of course, I 
> didn't think that would work, since none of the European sites I'd 
> been accessing were in anything other than English on the FTP 
> timestamps.  And that's what I got, too.  But I thought there must be 
> a configuration option for the server daemon to make this happen, 
> because as we know, there are SOME such sites.  But I couldn't find 
> one.
> OK, so apparently vsftpd does not support the i18n feature.  Does 
> anyone know of an ftp server that does?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: commons-dev-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: commons-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org
>
>


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: commons-dev-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: commons-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org