Re: FTP Service Discontinuance Under Consideration; Input Requested

On 4/4/2015 6:26 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
> --On Saturday, April 04, 2015 14:11 -0400 Paul Wouters
> <paul(_at_)nohats(_dot_)ca> wrote:
>
> > Btw, I agree. ftp is still at times problematic with active
> > ports and
> > firewall and it offers nothing that http cannot offer.
> You mean like the well-known HTTP "TYPE" and "STRU" verbs?
>
> It is likely that neither is an issue for IETF materials as long
> as they stay plain text.. at least with the possible exception
> of those who complain bitterly about difficulties in displaying
> I-Ds and RFC that use CRLF newline conventions, but it would
> probably be good to avoid sweeping generalizations like "nothing
> that http cannot offer".
+1

You know, I will venture that most people who still have FTP as part 
of their business or whatever, are not paying attention to this noise 
of "getting rid of it."   It would be a disservice if the IETF did 
something that would begin changing things unbeknowst to them.
From a business standpoint, I have quite a major 
enterprises/corporations, companies of all sizes who still use FTP for 
their mission critical operations and it will one of those things that 
"no one" is going to get rid of or replace with anything else.  I have 
two product lines that include FTP components is a big part of a 
virtual file/data I/O framework.  Legacy or not, it is pretty solid, 
especially for advanced FTP systems that may include "intelligent" 
(programmable) FTP clients.
As far the IETF "getting rid" of their own FTP server/service/access 
to files... well, for many years I have used my 1997 iFTP (intelligent 
FTP) console client to get the RFC documents.  It has DOS-like 
Move/Copy commands and options to save the file date (it might be 
default).  I use it all the time, on the fly, while I am reading a 
text doc via my console editor. When I see a reference to RFCXXXX of 
interest, I spawn a "GETRFC RFCxxxx.txt" job, etc.     I suppose I can 
change it to a web-based fetch/get, but the date will be lost too, 
which is OK, download date is fine for chronological timing of data.
Overall,  I suppose there are IETF FTP log files to show the level of 
activity. I am sure it would not be much but there is still activity. 
 We are making a big decision here, pretty quickly, and I hope that 
it doesn't get down to a situation where there are many folks who 
don't hang around here much, if ever, who are still using it in some 
fashion, but the IETF powers doesn't think much of that and shuts it 
down.   There are other tools, but that generally isn't the issue -- 
its changing something that people have been doing for a long time and 
don't need to change.  Those making the decision are most likely not 
using FTP anymore.  They would not feel the impact and it would be 
very easy to say that a "few people" still using it doesn't justify 
keeping it around.
Personally, I don't see why it needs to go. What is it hurting?  Is 
their an IETF cost savings here?  Shut down a PC?
My two pennies on the matter.  I would like to see the FTP server kept 
around.
--
HLS