> 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.
-- AlexP.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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