avoiding reinventing the wheel on file transfer.

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld%east.sun.com@localhost>]

So, I have this concern that we're going to spend a whole lot of time
on the file transfer draft, and in the process reinvent a couple
wheels which have already been built.

Here's a half-formed suggestion for the working group...

file transfer involves a bunch of really ugly issues (newline
conventions, binary/ascii/... modes, i18n of filenames, etc., etc.).
Many of these problems have already been tackled by FTP.

A radically different and simpler approach (from a standards-writing
viewpoint, at least) may well be to define a way to tunnel "normal"
ftp through a collection of ssh channels, so we can avoid refighting
all the battles which were fought over FTP... i.e., you start off with
one channel for the FTP control channel, and then open up new ssh
channels where "normal" FTP would open a new TCP connection....

						- Bill