Found some lovely piece of code deep into the FTP parts of Zope 2 last
saturday, one of them is truely ugly. It’s listing the contents of
the current and parent folders for no apparent reason (or at least, it
didn’t make sense either to me or Chris McDonough).

The code in question is in the manage_FTPstat method of
OFS.ObjectManager. Tracing back the source of this code, it seems
to have been (surprisingly) introduced by Jim Fulton, back in
1999. Here’s part of Jim’s checkin.

Later on, Amos Latteier changed part of the code (namely,
manage_FTPlist) to use a slightly more friendlier, yet equally
confusing is_acquired method. Here’s part of Amos’ checkin.

I’m now sitting here, trying to make sense of this code and wondering
what was the original intention in the first place. Would anyone have
a clue?