RE: Additional thoughts on text transfers

[Richard Whalen <Whalenr%process.com@localhost>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Niels Provos [mailto:provos%citi.umich.edu@localhost]
> Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 9:00 AM
> To: Richard Whalen
> Cc: 'ietf-ssh%netbsd.org@localhost'
> Subject: Re: Additional thoughts on text transfers
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 08:50:05AM -0500, Richard Whalen wrote:
> > Since modern day files may be encoded in a variety of 
> textual formats the
> > client and server need to come to an agreement on a format 
> when exchanging
> > text files.
> I disagree.  You are adding complexity without any significant gain.
> I never had any problems transfering text files as binary files
> between different operating systems.  Most applications are aware of
> the different encodings anyway.  For the rare case that they are not,
> you can always convert to your format manually.
> 
> I see absolutely no need to burden sftp with this issue.
> 
> Niels.
> 

And what kinds of systems have you exchanged text files with?  Ever try VMS?
The majority of text files on VMS systems are stored as variable length
record files with implied line separators.  In most files there is a 2 byte
record length between each record, that does not provide carriage control.