RE: Additional thoughts on text transfers

[Darren Moffat <Darren.Moffat%eng.sun.com@localhost>]

>On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Whalen wrote:
>
>> Text files are still in high usage, even with new (often proprietary)
>> formats that may not be converted.
>
>How/why can filexfer be expected to know about all these?

The only person that knows what they want for a given file is the
end user of that file.

I really don't want the protocol doing stuff like that on mybehalf,
particularly if I'm going to subsequently check anything about the file
hasn't changed - doing a EOL conversion changes the size and certainly
the MD5 digest of the file.

I think that implemenations that care about adding a conversion process
for EOL can do that outside of the filexfer protocol.  One proposal I
have heard was that the server could use extensions to say what the
EOL mechanism was on that given server, however this might not always work
well for MacOS X because it uses both Mac and UNIX style depending on
who created the file.

It is issues like this that continually make me think that the security
area is the wrong place in IETF to try and solve this problem.

--
Darren J Moffat