Re: Tombstone README for FTP service

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 4/28/22 10:07, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>> It should say that the IETF shamefully abandoned its own protocol,
>> despite it being valuable and providing features that don't exist in
>> any of the supposed protocols IETF replaced it with.
> Listing of remote files in a (may be) structured format? (It would be
> a nice addition to HTTP; I'm sure there is at least a draft with such
> an extension.) Difficulty with firewalls? Separation of signaling and
> retrieval? (This is less important with HTTP/2 an 3 streams.)

In spite of attempts to conflate them, FTP and HTTP have fundamentally 
different models.  Of course you can extend HTTP to provide the 
functionality that FTP has, but people will still think about them 
differently, provision them differently, and use them differently, and 
have different assumptions about them.

Or maybe what bugs me is not so much that IETF has abandoned FTP (though 
that does bug me) but rather that the Internet still has no standard, 
platform-independent, file system access protocol. FTP has obvious 
shortcomings for such use, but so do CIFS and NFS and sshfs, and FTP is 
arguably still the best of several poor solutions when you don't need to 
require authentication.

But rather than try to address this shortcoming, IETF decided to just 
give up.  Shameful.

Keith