Re: avoiding reinventing the wheel on file transfer.

[Damien Miller <djm%mindrot.org@localhost>]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> 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....

I can't say this appeals to me. Special-casing a clean protocol so we
can use it to wrap an ugly one for a few dubious features doesn't seem
like a win to me.

Others have observed that sftp is more NFS-like than FTP-like anyway,
perhaps it would server as a better source of inspiration wrt issues
such as i18n (I haven't been convinced that binary/ascii is even an
issue).

-d

-- 
| Damien Miller <djm%mindrot.org@localhost> \ ``E-mail attachments are the poor man's
| http://www.mindrot.org          /   distributed filesystem'' - Dan Geer