Re: SSH File Transfer Protocol - draft-moonesamy-secsh-filexfer-00

[Joseph Galbriath <[e-mail]>]

On 2013/07/12 8:42, denis bider (Bitvise) wrote:
> A fair number of implementations, including ours, implement SFTP
> versions 4 and 6, as specified in:
>
> draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-13.txt
>
> as well as extensions specified in:
>
> draft-galb-filexfer-extensions-00.txt
>
> Just because one open source implementation chooses to be stuck in the
> past - apparently because SFTP version 3 is simplistic, and offered most
> of what is needed on their target platform - doesn't mean it should get
> to dictate the standard.

I did find openssh's reluctance to look beyond the posix filesystem
world somewhat frustrating.

I will admit that the drafts grew much larger than I wanted, but we did
make efforts to make sure implementations didn't have to implement
things that didn't want or could not support.

> The latest SFTP version is 6. Restarting standardization at 3 doesn't
> mean implementations of 4 and 6 are going to go away. It in fact means
> that two concurrent SFTP version trees are going to exist in the future.
> I think this is a poor decision, and I do not support it.
>
> Any standardization efforts should continue where these documents left off:
>
> draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-13.txt
> draft-galb-filexfer-extensions-00.txt
>
> If OpenSSH chooses to be stuck in the past and implement an older
> version of the protocol known as SFTP version 3, then the OpenSSH
> project can document the version they implement, but based on one
> implementation, that doesn't need to be an internet standard.

I agree with this.

Thanks,

Joseph

> -----Original Message----- From: S Moonesamy
> Sent: Friday, July 12, 2013 06:18
> To: Peter Gutmann
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: SSH File Transfer Protocol - draft-moonesamy-secsh-filexfer-00
>
> Hi Peter,
> At 04:37 12-07-2013, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>> Some background information on this decision would be useful, for
>> example why
>> restart work on it now, and why use version 3 of the protocol as the
>> baseline?
>
> There was a short discussion a few months ago about Section 6.1 of an
> expired SFTP  drafts.  I used Version 3 as the baseline as that is
> the version which OpenSSH implemented.  In my opinion it would be
> easier to document Version 3 as an IETF specification instead of
> trying to pursue the previous efforts.
>
> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy
>
>