IMHO, a mirror tool that can push would be useful. It is common now
for individuals to have accounts through an ISP, but are only given FTP
and Web/CGI priviledges. Doing a hack that does a pull via CGI seems
clumsy to me, and it would require that an FTP or HTTP server being
running on the individual's machine (which is not likely since there
would be no need to do the mirror). A push mirror tool would be more
useful for this situation. If none is available, one can probably be
written using the Net::FTP module at CPAN.
I'm grateful for the comments about rdist et al and CGI scripts to do
mirroring in different ways. If I can upgrade the capabilities of one
server (it doesn't even have CGI), I might be able to raise the lowest
common denominator which now would restrict me to FTP as the way to
transmit a file to a server.
Regarding writing a FTP push-mirror, the most complexity seems to be in the
heterogeneity of the FTP servers. Ones on different platforms send back
different formats of directory listings that have to be parsed to obtain
file timestamps (and sizes if those are used in comparison; not useful in
cross-platform text files).
-- thanks, SP
