We (rsync.net) supported webDAV from ... about 2006-2012.
It was a total mess and headache the entire time - mostly because the standard implementations that you would attempt to use in a FOSS environment are complete abandonware.
I am speaking of mod_dav on apache. It's abandonware. The original authors cannot be contacted, it lies stagnant ... it's broken.
One of the original reasons that we supported webDAV was that the mac finder, with it's "Connect to Server" choice in the "Go" menu supported webDAV - but their webDAV was really, really quirky and non-standard and did not function well with anything. We had to reverse engineer Apples weirdness and even then it rarely worked well. MS DAV in office, etc. - also weird. And again, very difficult to even work around the weirdness because mod_dav was abandoned.
Giving up on DAV was a win-win - not only did we stop wasting time on these bizarro home-grown dialects of DAV, but we also removed a ton of attack surface by removing apache entirely from rsync.net storage arrays. Nowadays it's just OpenSSH and I think it will stay that way.
wistful: If only (if only!) Apple would support SFTP in the "connect to server" function of the Finder.
Do you have any insight into why SFTP support was never built into "connect to server" ?
It seems so simple and obvious ... would have saved humanity millions of man hours with people mucking around with sshFS/FUSE on their macs, which barely worked back then ...
No insight whatsoever. Probably nobody ever asked for it, to be honest. "Connect to Server ..." was overwhelmingly used to connect via AFP or, shudder NFS at the time, both of which expose a filesystem like interface. How much like a filesystem is a SFTP connection, as opposed to a FTP-like one? That's probably the reason, right there: WebDAV purported to expose filesystem semantics, which meant that in theory adding it was simply defining a communications protocol to the Finder, rather than a complete translation layer between filesystem operations and FTP ones.
I wrote a new one in Perl which was always going to become Net::DAV::Server upstream, but never found the time to push it. This would have been about 2006. Sorry about that :(
Mostly due to a lack of enthusiasm from Filesys::Virtual to add the hooks I needed.
It's still powering the FastMail DAV filestorage service, and running fine.
It was a total mess and headache the entire time - mostly because the standard implementations that you would attempt to use in a FOSS environment are complete abandonware.
I am speaking of mod_dav on apache. It's abandonware. The original authors cannot be contacted, it lies stagnant ... it's broken.
One of the original reasons that we supported webDAV was that the mac finder, with it's "Connect to Server" choice in the "Go" menu supported webDAV - but their webDAV was really, really quirky and non-standard and did not function well with anything. We had to reverse engineer Apples weirdness and even then it rarely worked well. MS DAV in office, etc. - also weird. And again, very difficult to even work around the weirdness because mod_dav was abandoned.
Giving up on DAV was a win-win - not only did we stop wasting time on these bizarro home-grown dialects of DAV, but we also removed a ton of attack surface by removing apache entirely from rsync.net storage arrays. Nowadays it's just OpenSSH and I think it will stay that way.
wistful: If only (if only!) Apple would support SFTP in the "connect to server" function of the Finder.