Re: ftp by Sunil Nimmagadda

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Thu, 16 May 2019 21:40:39 +0200
    From:        Maxime Villard <max%m00nbsd.net@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <62e8204b-bee5-24f4-c99d-196f0ca55ec2%m00nbsd.net@localhost>

  | We are in 2019, and some people are still wasting their time rewriting FTP
  | clients.

FTP is still a much better protocol (actually designed by people who
knew what they were doing) over the alternative (HTTP) which was just
thrown together without almost any real understanding of some of the
implications (which later versions have been trying to fix).

True, FTP has 3 way transfers - which all servers support, but very few
clients were ever written to utilise, which isn't all that much use
these days, and there are differences based upon the expected usage
model (HTTP servers tell the client what kind of file is being fetched,
FTP client users are expected to know what it is that they are fetching.
I leave it to you (all) to decide which is safer...)

Beyond that, almost all clients (including ours) speak both protocols,
their new ftp client program would (I assume, and if it still existed)
talk both FTP and HTTP, and most probably the secure versions of each
as well.

kre