kio_sftp rewrite

[Dawit A.]

Hi Andreas,

This is great. I have been thinking about doing this for KDE 4, but due to 
shortage of time nothing came of my initial plans. Anyhow, I have one few 
questions of the technical kind... The other ssh library libssh2 
(http://www.libssh2.org/) makes some claims of thread-safety (largley not a 
concern for KDE) and speed vs libssh. See

http://www.libssh2.org/libssh2-vs-libssh.html

Since I have no experience of using either library, my question is how much 
truth to that statement  (may be out of date page), but if it is true, can the 
issue be rectified in the future ? 

Regardless, as someone that looked over kio_sftp for a while, I like this 
change especially since you will then have to inherit and subsequently close 
the remaining kio_sftp bugs ;) 

Great work and good luck...


On Wednesday 05 August 2009 09:39:07 Andreas Schneider wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> My name is Andreas Schneider, I'm a developer and the maintainer of libssh,
> a library which implements the SSH Protocol.
> During the openSUSE Hack Week I've rewritten kio_sftp using libssh with the
> a little help from Dirk Müller. The old kioslave implemented the sftp
> protocol itself, executed the ssh binary and piped everything into the
> binary.
>
> With libssh you have less code to maintain and the new slave provides more
> features than the old one (datails for list and stat, resume support).
>
> I have a patch of my current work for KDE 4.3. You can find it here:
>
> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/1226/
>
> The slave works just fine here, but still needs more testing. If you want
> to test it you need at least libssh 0.3.2. You can get it at
> http://www.libssh.org/.
>
> If you're interested I would maintain kio_sftp and add more features. I'm
> implementing support for openssh extensions in libssh at the moment
> (statvfs, fstatvfs). This would allow us to check available disk space
> first before we copy anything to the server.
>
> More about libssh:
> -------------------
>
> libssh wasn't active for some time, then I joined the project and we are on
> the way for world domination now! We get more and more contributiors at the
> moment. We plan to have a release at least every 6 month. If there are
> serious bugs we will to bugfix releases as soon as possible.
>
> libssh 0.3 has *no official* Windows support yet. I build windows binaries
> with mingw since 0.3.0, see http://www.libssh.org/files/win32/
> I know that there are windows users of libssh cause patches are flying in.
>
> libssh 0.4 will have official Windows support. I just have to fix this MSVC
> crap first ;)
>
>
> Comments are welcome :)
>
> Best regards,
>
>
>         -- andreas