Do bug reports sent via interface go anywhere?

[tired]

I have found a reproducible crash in BC3 build 459. I've sent the bug report email via the window that appears. I just wanted to make sure that facility actually works--that is, the bug reports are actually received.

I'm asking because: There was one occasion with another software product that I was beta testing where I kept sending bug reports in exactly this same manner, and found out after some weeks that those bug reports were not being received...

[Zoë]

I can confirm that we've gotten quite a few bug reports using it. I can't say on yours specifically without knowing what kind of crash it was or what name you submitted it under. I wasn't able to find anything using the email address you used to sign up for the forums.

[tired]

Mine was a crash that happens immediately after a standard (port 21) FTP session is established. The email address is "scootersoftware@d*.com".

[Tim]

Yes, we got that one.

Thanks

[Zoë]

Your bug report mentions connecting via SSH, but the screenshot shows an FTP connection. Are you tunneling over SSH using one of the options at Using Beyond Compare 2 over SFTP? If so none of those are necessary anymore; BC3 supports SFTP and FTPS natively.

It appears that the "Output truncated to 2000 matches" is a PureFTP limitation. If you have access to the server there's some discussion on changing the maximum here. If you don't I'd recommend turning off recursive directory listings in BC.

Regardless of the above we'll try to get the crash fixed. Without making some change on your side though you're going to continue to get that message so BC won't receive the full directory listing and will consider the load a failure.

[tired]

I'm confused. The crash only seems to occur if I connect using plain FTP, not with SFTP. If I mentioned SSH in the report I was mistaken, unless I was pointing out that the crash doesn't happen with SFTP.

Also, the crash occurs even when I simply try using the "Connect & Browse" button (with FTP, not SFTP).

[Zoë]

If you have recursive listings enabled BC3 will use them whenever it's visiting a directory it hasn't previously, including "Connect & Browse". I can see that being undesirable in that instance, so we'll add that to the buglist.

There are two issues within BC3: (1) The crash you first reported when the server reports this error, and (2) it uses recursive listings for "Connect & Browse".

There's one issue with your configuration: You're using PureFTPd, which is limited to 2000 items in a directory listing, in combination with recursive listings.

SFTP won't show the issue because (1) it's not using PureFTPd and (2) SFTP doesn't support recursive listings. Other FTP clients generally don't use recursive listings, so you'd only see the problem if you had a single directory with more than 2000 files in it.

There are certainly cases where recursive listings are desirable, so I'd recommend either not using "Connect & Browse" short-term, or turning off recursive listings, browsing to setting up your session, and then re-enabling recursive listings once you have a saved session you can use. If the directories you're comparing have more than 2000 items in them (including in subfolders), then you're still going to run into the PureFTPd limitation, so you'll still be stuck either increasing the limit in the PureFTPd configuration or keeping recursive listings disabled.

[Chris]

tired,

Thanks for reporting the bug. I reproduced this with a test FTP server and added it to our bug list to be fixed. In my testing turning off recursive directory listings (-R) prevented the crash.

[Zoë]

I have the crash fixed for the next release, but even after it's out I strongly discourage using recursive listings with PureFTPd.

During my testing I discovered that when it truncates the directory listings it flags some directories as empty even though they contain files and subdirectories. This is only an issue with PureFTPd servers and I consider it a bug in their software. We may work around it at some point, but it may not be in the next release.

[tired]

Thank you very much for the help and feedback. I guess I lucked out in choosing a host with crap FTP server software.

This may explain some of the bizarre things I've been seeing when I've tried to sync my local copies to the server. I nearly went insane because I kept seeing different things depending on what software I was using. (Now I have thousands of files on the server that need to be changed to lower case, but that's a different story...)

[tired]

Now running build 461, and when I run the applicable profile, I get this notice:

Truncated listing received

The Pure-FTPd server you connected to returned a truncated listing. The comparison will be incomplete and may miss files or entire directories. To fix,
either turn off recursive listings in the profile for this server, or increase Pure-FTPd's LimitRecursion Encrypt and Compress Data setting.

What do I do about this, given that I already have recursive listings disabled?

[Zoë]

If you have control over the FTP server increase the LimitRecursion option in the Pure-FTPd configuration.

If you don't have control over the FTP server, you'll need to (1) ask your service provider to increase the LimitRecursion setting, (2) change service providers, or (3) rearrange your directories so there aren't more than 2000 items in any one directory.

[Aaron]

Right. The issue is that Pure will hit a limit once you get to 2000 files. If you have recursive directories enabled, then you hit this as the recursion happens (even if the folder you are looking at doesn't have 2000 files in it). This is intentional (the option is to LimitRecursion after all

If a single folder has 2000 files in it, however, then the limit itself must be increased on the server side.

We added this message to hopfully make it clearer to PureFTP users which settings to look for. Would you be able to reorganize your files into subdirectories?

[tired]

My last point also had to do with what I believe is the erroneous wording of the aforementioned message that appears:

The comparison will be incomplete and may miss files or entire directories. To fix, either turn off recursive listings in the profile for this server, or...

The message quoted above mentions a problem (i.e. "The comparison will be incomplete and may miss files or entire directories"), and goes on to explicitly say that the issue can be fixed by "turn[ing] off recursive listings in the profile". But as has been pointed out above, that's not a real fix--the only real fix is to reconfigure the server, or rearrange files on it.

Basically, turning off the recursive listing setting isn't a fix for this problem, so the message shouldn't say it is...