On 11/17/20 11:42 AM, Livingood, Jason wrote:
On 11/17/20, 10:46 AM, "ietf on behalf of Keith Moore" <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx on behalf of moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I cannot say this often enough: Traffic volume is not an indicator of importance.
[JL] Fair enough. But we also have a count of the number of hosts using the FTP interface and that is a quite small number. Most seem to be scripted, presumably to create a mirror of the RFCs.
Ok, but don't equate "host" to "some user's PC". A "host" could be
operating a service that is valuable to many. And in general, it seems
like it's in IETF's interest to facilitate development of services that
use RFCs.
Though I suppose that new services could reasonably use WebDAV if
reasonable libraries and scriptable programs exist to access WebDAV
servers. But the original proposal was to deprecate file-system like
access entirely, not to substitute WebDAV for FTP.
Also, perhaps the IETF and IAB should be a bit less dogmatic, in light
of experience. I keep seeing situations in which deprecation of old TLS
versions is breaking systems for which there is no browser that supports
the new TLS versions. IMO this does significant harm.
[JL] The IETF regularly standardizes new protocols that leads to "creative disruption" globally. This brings countless positive benefits, such as pervasive encryption or real-time voice and video communications, but it surely has some downsides/impacts. It seems odd that we may be unable to do just a little bit of what we ask others to do in terms of disruption and proceed forward by dropping legacy unencrypted protocols with no apparent user demand & embracing more modern and secure communication protocols.
Maybe we shouldn't be so eager to break things that work. Maybe,
especially, we shouldn't assume that we're in a position to know the
right answer to every user's needs and every use case.
BTW FTP was first specified 49 years ago in 1971. ;-)
Yeah, isn't it great that FTP has worked for so long? New is not
generally better, and often it's worse. HTTP has always lacked
functionality that had been present in FTP for decades. That was mostly
fine as long as FTP was still supported. I have used FTP several times
a year for several years (often in patent work) because in those
instances it worked better than HTTP and a browser.
Keith
