draft-bryan-ftp-hash-00 -- items for discussion

[Alfred Hönes <[e-mail]>]

I have been asked to respin on apps-discuss a summary of concerns
raised in the pre-draft stage for draft-bryan-ftp-hash-00 and
communicated to the authors after draft submisison.

Here we go ...


-------- forwarded content of message to the authors -------

It looks like the concerns raised so far have not been adressed.
[ Thus, the first part of Appendix C, which pretends "no known issues",
  sounds ironical.  :-)  ]

In particular:

a) untypical use of a command with a file path argument *and*
   another argument -- consider using:
        OPTS HASH <hash>
        HASH <filepath>

b) underspecification of the representation of the file that shall
   undergo the hash calculation; a canonical form of the file is
   essential here for interoperability; I already have discussed
   some of the options that came to my mind: using the current
   transfer mode settings, defining a specific overriding set of
   mode settings, or requiring a single specific set of mode
   settings to be active (or a small choice of such).
   I cannot imagine how verification would be possible without
   a well defined canonical file representation in a heterogenous
   systems environment where e.g. one system uses record-oriented
   file storage and another one uses byte-stream storage with either
   <NL> or <CRLF> convention, one system pads records with blanks
   to an alignment boundary and another system truncates trailing
   blanks on file lines, ... (all that behavior exists in my office!)

Further, I'd like to draw your attention to RFC 5797 and the
FTP Commands and Extensions IANA Registry it has established now, at
  <http://www.IANA.ORG/assignments/ftp-commands-extensions/
          ftp-commands-extensions.xhtml> ).
So you might wish to amend your proposal with substantial IANA
considerations for the registration of the proposed extension and
the associated FEAT strings.

Also, it might make sense to give reference to prior work;
I'm aware of an old expired I-D, draft-twine-ftpmd5-00, May 2002.

Typos:
-  Abstract:   s/intergrity/integrity/
-  Sect.1:  s/from a FTP server/from an FTP server/


Kind regards,
  Alfred Hönes.

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