Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:19:32 -0800 (PST) | From | Alex Belits <> | Subject | Re: Comments on Microsoft Open Source documentA |
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On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 1998 at 01:34:46PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > Most older protocols are even less optimal (I have in mind RFC 822 and > > > FTP as the worst offenders), but everyone keeps using them. The only > > > protocol that ever has successfully been abandoned since the > > > > FTP is dying, the main things that keep it alive are the fact http > > daemons are bad at handing out large files, and the fact http clients dont > > use byte ranges on broken file transfer retries. > > FTP does a lot of things nicer. http doesn't show me the symlinks out > there. It doesn't allow "site chmod". It doesn't allow gets based > on wildcards (mget, or get in ncftp). > > There are lots of reasons FTP is still here.
As a person who implemented both I can certainly say that FTP is not nice, just HTTP interface with filesystem is really poorly standardized. Nothing keeps people with a clue from standardizing, say, arguments for filesystem handling through URLs, and things like "http://host/pub/gnu-mirror/?list=gcc*&format=ls+-l", or something better will provide the same functionality by better means. HTTP 1.1 is a large thing that spans the fuctionality of HTTP server itself and various scripts, so I don't think, it should grow into even larger monster, but separate RFC about filesystem handling will be just fine.
-- Alex
P.S. And please, keep "filenames must be in Unicode" out of this -- it's a filesystem, dammit -- host knows what its filenames are!
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