In article < 60648e0e-55d6-86a1-e40f-342133110f9d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> you write: On 11/11/20 10:40 PM, Roman Danyliw wrote:
As noted in the proposal, ALL data is available at least two other ways (https://www.ietf.org/ietf-ftp or rsync). By request
volume, HTTPS is massively preferred (FTP is 0.2% of HTTPS document traffic, and this is undercounting HTTPS usage) by the vast
majority of users. If the bulk download semantics are desired, to include incremental updates with no code required, then rsync is
the best choice. Do you have a user community in mind that can use FTP, but not HTTPS or rsync that we need to consider?
rsync is not nearly as widely supported as FTP. And while rsync works
okay for mirroring, I've never seen it used for remote file access.
This makes no sense. What computers do you believe that people use in 2020 that support FTP but not rsync? And if that were true, why do we see orders of magnitude more rsync traffic than FTP?
John, if you mean “What distributions out-of-the-box offer FTP but not rsync?”, I poked around NetBSD a bit and found that one can build an ftp client binary from its sources, but couldn’t find the rsync sources in any of the “usual” places. On the other hand, I imagine it is possible to get rsync sources from some other (related) BSD distribution and build its binary with perhaps a bit of extra work. I use a Mac laptop which, based on what I've seen at IETF meetings, is
a fairly popular choice. It has rsync as part of the base system, and
no FTP client other than as part of curl, which of course also supports
http and https.
AFAIK, ftp client functionality is available in Catalina and later MacOS releases through the Zftp Function System. It also may be available depending upon which Perl, Python, or Tcl packages are installed.
—gregbo |
