Re: Interest in reviving WG on FTP(maybe ext?)

["William F. Maton Sotomayor" <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009, John C Klensin wrote:

> With the understanding that I have been, and remain, sympathetic
> to getting a WG spun up if there is interest, the conclusion in
> Dublin and elsewhere was that there really wasn't critical mass
> to do this.  Critical mass would require people who were willing
> to actually work on, review, and, where appropriate, implement
> each other's documents, not just present ideas and hope that

Thanks for the update.  At least there's closure on that aspect of it.

> others sign off.  There have been a number of drafts posted
> relevant to FTP.  Some seems obvious to me (like the extension
> registry), others may be seriously bad ideas, and most lie
> somewhere in between.

I've seen a number of them over the year's on various websites and snarfed 
a few for posterity.  Agreed, some of them are good ideas.  I'd like to 
see your's revived as I just went through this exercise myself to figure 
out what's missing from wu-ftpd versus what's new.  Hmmm....I should post 
the result of that script output somewhere.  (Good idea, maybe it will 
form the basis of your missing section.)

> If that critical mass exists, then someone needs to get to work
> on a charter, perhaps using the one that a couple of us put
> together a year ago as a starting point.  If it doesn't, then
> writing and posting more FTP extension drafts is probably a
> waste of time -- given the number of proposals, if there isn't

A couple of people I have contacted are interested in putting in more 
proposals, and implementations seem to exist for at least one of them:

- gridFTP, for extensions involving bulk transfers of scientific data

- David Somers has one with a few extensions that some other FTP
   implementors seem to be pushing ahead with.

> enough interest to put a WG together, then it would be hard to
> argue that there is sufficient interest in FTP extensions in the
> community to justify standardizing anything.
>
> That is just my opinion, but I think it is a reasonable summary
> of where things stood a year ago.  I'm not convinced that
> anything has changed.

Thanks John, much appreciated.  I don't know how many here are of the FTP 
slant, but I'm sure others could be asked beyond that to solicit further 
interest down the road.  I would expect that process itself to take some 
time too.

wfms