Subject: Re: tnftp and HTTP cookies
To: None <tech-userlevel@NetBSD.org>
From: Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios@theory.cs.uni-bonn.de>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 12/16/2003 09:07:45
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Hello,

On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 08:44:04PM +0100, Klaus Heinz wrote:
> Hi,
>=20
> /usr/bin/ftp (tnftp) cannot retrieve=20
>=20
>   http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/files/documents/341/8734/rapidsvn-0.4.0.tar.=
gz
>=20
> due to the use of HTTP cookies.

> So far this has been the only URL where I
> have seen this and I wonder whether people would be interested in cookie
> support (RFC 2109) for tnftp.

Well, this is a last-century-viewpoint, but....

Using http instead of ftp for bulk data transfer is sort-of-strange.
Using cookies for http bulk data transfers makes me want to call this
"sick".

I can't think of acceptable (to me) reasons why you would need cookies
for anonymous bulk data transfers.

So my advise would be to complain to the data providers instead...


If this is a non-anonymous transfer requiring some sort of "authentication"
that depends on cookies, well, maybe using a real WWW client would be=20
better, anyway...

This said: I have no idea how complicated a null cookie support (one where
the cookie is thrown away after being acknowledged) would be, but if it is
implementable easily, this would be the right answer to such servers.

I've known people who linked .netscaped/cookies to /dev/null :-)

Regards,
	-is

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