On 7/4/24 05:41, Dave Cridland wrote:
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.
I really regard this as a failure on IETF's part, in that much of IETF seems to think nowdays that the Internet is just a way for mostly proprietary applications to exchange information with other instances of those proprietary applications. The ARPAnet and early Internet has a core set of widely implemented, and generally platform-independent applications, and that played a large part in making the Internet great.
These days we hardly have any platform-independent applications left other than the web, especially given the tendency of several email vendors to pollute email with their own vendor-specific hacks that are specifically designed to make it painful to use another vendor's email product.
Keith
