--On Tuesday, December 1, 2020 02:45 +0100 Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote: >> it is all hopeless > > You may be on to something… > > But more seriously, the saying is "choose your battles", > and I think in this specific area (getting any processing, or > even just the metadata right while serving up collections of > files) it is really hard to make a difference. Agreed. I'm not really pushing this -- I certainly have not posted any I-Ds on the subject in the last eight years. The questions were motivated by a hypothesis that there are some people out there who think FTP is useful, are using it, and are are using conforming implementations (e.g., the default really is ASCII and not Image) and possibly a significant fraction of its features. Put differently, they are using FTP in a way that takes advantage of its capabilities rather than using in a way for which any number of other things, starting with rcp and/or rsync and their clones, would do equally well. Then _for that group_ (a group of which you are clearly not part - and I don't have any problem with that at all), the questions are whether a "cannot reliably convert to that TYPE" code and/or an explicit Unicode TYPE would be helpful and worth supporting. I agree with you that good-quality support would not be straightforward on some (probably most) contemporary systems but I'm not convinced that it is impossible if there were adequate motivation. However, the implementation issues are not even worth exploring or probably even speculating about if no one is interested. best, john