On Thu, 4 Jul 2024, 10:23 Keith Moore, <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 7/4/24 04:16, Dave Cridland wrote:
[*] then again, I remember times when I'd routinely keep FTP sessions up for well over 24 hours, and I don't see why that's not still reasonable.
Mostly it's unreasonable because it's FTP, which is rather like using TOPS-20. It's an unmaintained protocol, and almost certainly not the right choice unless you just want to use it for the perverse nerdy pleasure of using an ancient system. And yes, I was involved in some of the last work on that, too - indeed, the first IETF work I did was around FTP and NAT traversal.Problem is, no widely applicable replacement for FTP ever emerged. scp is probably the closest but still lacking in some ways. I could see deprecating FTP because there aren't that many systems any more that require its very baroque approach to file representation, and also because of lack of good authentication. What never made sense to me is not supporting any kind of widely applicable file transfer protocol standard.
I don't dispute that it's not a great situation. Rsync is sometimes good enough, scp also, and of course basic file downloads can be done using http. A proper replacement could be done, but it would depend on compliance with the de facto architecture which eschews most of the principles FTP relies upon.
Another casualty of the success of the http-only model.
Keith
