RE: Additional thoughts on text transfers

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Markus Friedl [mailto:markus%openbsd.org@localhost]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 3:11 AM
> To: Jeffrey Altman
> Cc: Damien Miller; Richard Whalen; 'ietf-ssh%netbsd.org@localhost'
> Subject: Re: Additional thoughts on text transfers
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 12:16:19AM -0500, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> > > That kinda proves the point that I was trying to make - 
> that the format
> > > decision and processing can be built into the clients (or 
> servers) and not
> > > into the protocol itself.
> > 
> > No it doesn't.  It provies that it must be built into the protocol.
> 
> Then why does everybody write lines and lines of email instead of
> writing a draft using the mechanisms provided by
> 	draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02.txt
> 

The mechanisms provided by draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02.txt fall short of
what is needed to provide a text transfer mechanism.

The file attributes mechanism has plenty of flexibilty to present
information about the type of information in the file, and whether or not
any translations can be provided.  Right now it says nothing about the type
and that no translations are available.

The OPEN/READ/WRITE mechanism is where the problem lies.  It specifies
particular bytes from the file, and on some systems those bytes may contain
a mixture of actual data and system specific details.  When those system
specific details are transfered to a dissimilar system they become at best
useless. In the worst case they make the entire file useless, as programs on
the second system do not know to ignore the system specific details and
declare the file to be corrupt.

----------------------
Richard Whalen
Process Software