[tahoe-lafs-trac-stream] [Tahoe-LAFS] #2097: deprecate FTP in favor of SFTP?

[Tahoe-LAFS]

#2097: deprecate FTP in favor of SFTP?
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     Reporter:  zooko        |      Owner:  daira
         Type:  defect       |     Status:  new
     Priority:  normal       |  Milestone:  1.12.0
    Component:  code-        |    Version:  1.10.0
  frontend                   |   Keywords:  ftpd sftp forward-compatibility
   Resolution:               |
Launchpad Bug:               |
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Comment (by warner):

 I'm -0 on removing FTP. My main reason is that the FTP model of a
 filesystem is much much closer to Tahoe's own model: less "impedance
 mismatch", so I think it's going to give a much better experience. FTP
 works strictly in terms of PUT and GET, which tahoe does great.

 SFTP has notions of read/write/seek/attrs, which are common for real
 (local) POSIX filesystems, but are hard to simulate (requiring temporary
 buffers until `close()`, like the various not-so-happy-making FUSE
 implementations). This fits better with mutable files, at the cost of
 complexity (sftpd.py is over 6x larger than ftpd.py), but I'm not
 convinced that most people use mutable files for general-purpose storage.
 It's true that SFTP is more modern and has important+useful properties
 (better unicode, file modes, directory management), but personally I'd
 expect better behavior from telling my OS to mount a localhost FTP server
 than a similar SFTP server.

 That said, I understand how people will ignore docs and use whatever seems
 obvious, so if people are actively being hurt (made insecure) by the
 presence of the FTP server, and if the SFTP server is really a
 satisfactory replacement, then I'm willing to let go of FTP.

--
Ticket URL: <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/2097#comment:8>
Tahoe-LAFS <https://Tahoe-LAFS.org>
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