On Friday, August 18, 2006 05:05:46 PM -0500 Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams%sun.com@localhost> wrote:I suspect that the set of people likely to be interested in working on a filesystem access protocol is different than the set where were interested in working on the core ssh protocol. So, it's entirely possible that a BOF on this subject may produce enough interest to form a WG.For one item? Note that the security area wouldn't be a very good home for this. The transport area seems more appropriate, particularly for a filesystem protocol.It's only one item if you make it huge and monolithic. If, instead, you break it out into a manageable base document and a set of optional extensions, it becomes several items. It also offers the opportunity to take a step back and figure out what the goals and requirements actually are. So far, it seems like they get rehashed with every proposed extension, and it's starting to get hard to tell what the consensus is. About the only thing that's clear to me is that the people working on this project mostly are interested in something like a filesystem, rather than something like a file transfer protocol.I agree the security area is not the right home for this. I'm inclined to think the right home is actually the apps area; I've never understood why NFS was in transport and not apps. Perhaps someone else knows.-- Jeff
Some have argued that the recent additions to the SFTP draft make it more like a filesystem. I would argue the basic implementation that most folks are using (SFTP v3) is more like a filesystem than a file transfer protocol. In particular, there is no put or get in SFTP v3 - instead it has open, close, read, write, etc. I'm not sure where the work or WG belongs, but I would like to see the SFTP draft completed (acknowledging that is has always been more filesystem than file transfer) - even if we had to strip it down to core functionality and push off some of the newer stuff to extensions. I'd also be very supportive of a file transfer draft too. However, I'm not sure there is enough consensus to make this happen :-) I think having a documented standard for transferring files using more of a put and get mechanism would address many of the real world issues (e.g. performance and logging) that SFTP has. --Jeff V.