RE: Additional thoughts on text transfers

[Jeffrey Altman <jaltman%columbia.edu@localhost>]

Richard:

Many of us in the community have raised these issues before.  The vast
majority of the SSH development community is on Unix.  The vast
majority of the rest is on Windows.  Between the two groups they do
not see this as an issue because they are not affected by the scale of
the M x N problem which is alleviated by defining a standard on the
wire representation for End of Line.

The way things are now you are expected to solve this problem in the
client by knowing based upon the type of the host you are
communicating with how the End of Line is represented.  Some people
suggest that you should download the file first in binary and then
perform the conversion with external tools.  Of course, that assumes
the receiver is aware of the End of Line representation for both the
server and client operating system.

The Kermit Project has decided to address this problem by not
recommending the use of SFTP.  Instead we have modified C-Kermit 8.0
to allow it to be installed as a SSH Subsystem for the purpose of file
transfer.  Of course, you can still use it to just send files across
the SSH terminal session as well.

Kermit protocol provides you with recursive directory tree transfers;
conversion of pathname formats if necessary; automatic recognition of
text or binary mode based upon the content of the file (not just
extensions which mean different things to different operating
systems); as well as many other features.  For details see

  http://www.kermit-project.org/skermit.html

- Jeff


> Text files are still in high usage, even with new (often proprietary)
> formats that may not be converted.
> 
> Source code for programs are generally stored as text files, and the input
> for programs may be text files as well.
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Markus Friedl [mailto:markus%openbsd.org@localhost]
> > Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2002 11:39 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.
> > 
> > Modern day files are binary documents (pdf, doc, viruses), so no
> > conversions is necessary.  SFTP is slim and simple, you can do text
> > conversion in you client application based on suffix-heuristics,
> > for example.
> > 
> 



 Jeffrey Altman * Sr.Software Designer      C-Kermit 8.0 available now!!!
 The Kermit Project @ Columbia University   includes Telnet, FTP and HTTP
 http://www.kermit-project.org/             secured with Kerberos, SRP, and 
 kermit-support%columbia.edu@localhost                OpenSSL. Interfaces with OpenSSH