Subject: Re: Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

From: Greg Skinner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 17:45:40 -0800

> On Nov 13, 2020, at 10:01 AM, John Levine <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> In article <[email-masked]> you write:
>> On 11/11/20 10:40 PM, Roman Danyliw wrote:
>> 
>>> As noted in the proposal, ALL data is available at least two other ways (https://www.ietf.org/ietf-ftp  or rsync).  By request
>> volume, HTTPS is massively preferred (FTP is 0.2% of HTTPS document traffic, and this is undercounting HTTPS usage) by the vast
>> majority of users.  If the bulk download semantics are desired, to include incremental updates with no code required, then rsync is
>> the best choice.  Do you have a user community in mind that can use FTP, but not HTTPS or rsync that we need to consider?
>> 
>> rsync is not nearly as widely supported as FTP.   And while rsync works 
>> okay for mirroring, I've never seen it used for remote file access.
> 
> This makes no sense. What computers do you believe that people use in
> 2020 that support FTP but not rsync? And if that were true, why do we
> see orders of magnitude more rsync traffic than FTP?

John, if you mean “What distributions out-of-the-box offer FTP but not rsync?”, I poked around NetBSD a bit and found that
one can build an ftp client binary from its sources, but couldn’t find the rsync sources in any of the “usual” places.  On the other hand, I imagine it is possible to get rsync sources from some other (related) BSD distribution and build its binary with perhaps a bit of extra work.

> I use a Mac laptop which, based on what I've seen at IETF meetings, is
> a fairly popular choice.  It has rsync as part of the base system, and
> no FTP client other than as part of curl, which of course also supports
> http and https.

AFAIK, ftp client functionality is available in Catalina and later MacOS releases through the Zftp Function System <https://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/programming/linux/zsh-doc/zsh_24.html>.  It also may be available depending upon which Perl, Python, or Tcl packages are installed.

—gregbo

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From: Viktor Dukhovni <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 20:52:08 -0500

On Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 05:45:40PM -0800, Greg Skinner wrote:

> John, if you mean “What distributions out-of-the-box offer FTP but not
> rsync?”, I poked around NetBSD a bit and found that one can build an
> ftp client binary from its sources, but couldn’t find the rsync
> sources in any of the “usual” places.  On the other hand, I imagine it
> is possible to get rsync sources from some other (related) BSD
> distribution and build its binary with perhaps a bit of extra work.

If rsync is not in the "base" NetBSD distribution it is easily installed
via pkgsrc:

    http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/net/rsync/README.html

-- 
    Viktor.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 21:37:33 -0500

On 12/1/20 8:45 PM, Greg Skinner wrote:

>
> AFAIK, ftp client functionality is available in Catalina and later 
> MacOS releases through the Zftp Function System 
> <https://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/programming/linux/zsh-doc/zsh_24.html>. 
>  It also may be available depending upon which Perl, Python, or Tcl 
> packages are installed.

There are also multiple Mac ftp clients available through Homebrew.   (I 
can't imagine having a MacOS box without Homebrew, just like I can't 
imagine having a Windows box without cygwin.)

---

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 19:08:55 -0800

> can't imagine having a MacOS box without Homebrew, just like I can't 

I can.  (My personal mac doesn't have homebrew, or fink, or macports; just
a small grouping of critical third-party software compiled by hand, and
VMWare Fusion for doing more complicated things.)

> imagine having a Windows box without cygwin.)

My latest PC I kept Windows 10 on for a couple weeks before installing
Debian, and tried out the windows subsystem for linux.  It was actually
pretty usable -- the main annoyance was that cmd.exe is a lousy terminal
emulator.  But I'm told that there are other options available.  I don't
think I would need to have cygwin anymore in order to be able to do my
normal work, were I somehow compelled to use a windows machine full time.

I hope we can all try to keep in mind that others' workflows may well
differ from our own, and that is (usually) okay.  (That is, to some extent,
a key theme of this entire long thread.)

-Ben

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 22:21:56 -0500

On 12/1/20 10:08 PM, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:

> differ from our own, and that is (usually) okay.

Indeed, and I would probably call that a Good Thing.    My comments were 
intended as "you might be interested in knowing that these tools exist", 
not as "you should feel bad if you don't use these".

Keith

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2020 01:26:45 -0500

Everyone using Windows 10 should install Windows Terminal. It is a vast
improvement on the old terminal library and it has some really unique and
obvious features.

You have tabs for a start. So you can have three tabs for three different
directories you are working on.

You can choose the command shell. So I currently have a CMD prompt, a
powershell shell and an Ubuntu shell in different tabs. There are a handful
of tools that I don't have on Windows because my policy is to keep machines
as close as possible to stock and it wasn't much hassle to just ssh to the
linux box. Now I can just open a new ubuntu tab to use dig or whatever.

You can even specify your own shell environment.