Re: documenting rsync, or, what are we here for anyway? (was: Re: what is rsync)

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>> standards-making organization that's trying to promote interoperability, is
>> that people who seem to be somewhat prominent in this organization are now
>> arguing that we should replace a proven standard protocol that has probably
>> hundreds of implementations, with a protocol that may be less functional,
>> is not a standard, doesn't have a published spec, and only seems to have a
>> small number of implementations.

I think we have it backwards. On today's Internet, rsync is clearly a
lot more useful than FTP. It doesn't have FTP's quaint warts (telnet
compatibility and in-line port numbers) and is better suited for large
disks and fast networks. The relative amount of traffic we see
confirms this.

This tells me not that we should stick our heads in the sand and
pretend that if FTP was state of the art in 1985 it must still be now,
but rather that since we all use rsync, it's worth at least
documenting and if possible standardizing.

I said it's not urgent because there is a lot of public documentation
and open source code that is not going away, so there is no chance
that it will become impossible or even inconvenient to use rsync, but
that also means we have a good place to start if we want to publish a
spec.

R's,
John