RE: ftp study (technical report)

["George D. Greenwade" <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 29 Sep 92 11:17:28 MET, Silvano Maffeis <[e-mail]>
posted:
> ifi-tr-92.13                   (available electronically as ifi-92.13.ps.Z)
>
> Abstract
>
> Global filesystems and new file transfer protocols are a great need and
> challenge in the presence of drastically growing networks. In this paper we
> present results obtained from an investigation of access to public files
> which took place over three months. This work visualizes first results on
> the popularity of public ftp  files, on common operations (deletions,
> updates and insertions) to public file-archives and on encountered
> filesizes. An index for measuring locality of reference to a resource is
> also proposed. The results show that most file transfers relate to only a
> small fraction of the files in an archive and that a considerable part of
> the operations to public files are updates of files. Further results are
> presented and interpreted in the paper.

I very sincerely hope that one of the "further results" deals with the
portability of the files on the polled systems, especially when the file is
(apparently) intended to be somewhat platform-independent (as I presume
this one to be).  I'm not suggesting 8+3; however, conceptualizing ftp to
always be to/from systems directly supporting multiple periods (as this
file suffers from; as does the draft.part.I and draft.part.II; as do any
number of files on anonymous ftp archives).  Once again, we return to the
"special characters" issue!

IMO, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to believe that files on IAFA's have to
be actual working names on the host system (or any system!) without some
modification on the retrieving working system.  I have seen an increasing
number of friendly IAFA's using names such as ifi-92_13.ps_z (yes, even a
lowercase "z"), which are much nicer to have to deal with.  Narrow minded
Unix users will complain "but then I have to rename it ifi-92_13.ps.Z (or
whatever) to get it to uncompress".  Big deal -- users on single period
systems just want to GET the file (and will probably have to rename it as
well!).

This really needs to be thought about if IAFA's are really "a great need
and challenge in the presence of drastically growing networks."

Regards,   George
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George D. Greenwade, Ph.D.                            Bitnet:  BED_GDG@SHSU
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