My concern has been mentioned in more comprehensive responses, but I think as a concern it has been lost from the discussion. Since FTP has been offered as an access method for IETF documents since almost the beginning of time there exist many many documents in private repositories which include FTP references for retrieval of related material. It would be irresponsible to break a long-time commitment to the stability of these references. And it would make the organization look incompetent. I can imagine that there are situations where access to specific documents by explicit reference would traverse a firewall that wouldn't allow the generic searches needed to locate the alternative access method. If the FTP server product which refuses to follow SYMLINKs must be used for some operational reason, creating a clone of the tree full of SYMLINKs with fully resolved file copies isn't rocket science. rsync for example will perform that function with the proper flags. - Dave Morris