RE: Tombstone README for FTP service

[Roman Danyliw <rdd@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

 

There is community consensus [1] to execute the FTP retirement plan [2].  This plan included adding a “tombstone readme”.  Feedback on additional references are welcome.

 

Thanks,

Roman

 

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/vi-8bFqlgBFjB2jJ1SIAGHiNRdg/

[2] https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/Revised-Retiring-IETF-FTP-Service-2021-03.pdf

 

From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Keith Moore
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2022 10:16 AM
To: Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx>
Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Tombstone README for FTP service

 

On 4/28/22 10:07, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

It should say that the IETF shamefully abandoned its own protocol,

despite it being valuable and providing features that don't exist in

any of the supposed protocols IETF replaced it with.

Listing of remote files in a (may be) structured format? (It would be

a nice addition to HTTP; I'm sure there is at least a draft with such

an extension.) Difficulty with firewalls? Separation of signaling and

retrieval? (This is less important with HTTP/2 an 3 streams.)

In spite of attempts to conflate them, FTP and HTTP have fundamentally different models.  Of course you can extend HTTP to provide the functionality that FTP has, but people will still think about them differently, provision them differently, and use them differently, and have different assumptions about them.

Or maybe what bugs me is not so much that IETF has abandoned FTP (though that does bug me) but rather that the Internet still has no standard, platform-independent, file system access protocol.   FTP has obvious shortcomings for such use, but so do CIFS and NFS and sshfs, and FTP is arguably still the best of several poor solutions when you don't need to require authentication.

But rather than try to address this shortcoming, IETF decided to just give up.  Shameful.

Keith