Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Ticket #2097


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Timestamp:
2013-11-03T18:56:40Z (11 years ago)
Author:
zooko
Comment:

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  • Ticket #2097 – Description

    initial v1  
    88In other words, I've observed that people are unaware of the limitations and problems in the FTP protocol and the LAFS-FTPd implementation, mentioned above and documented in [source:trunk/docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst], even though we've documented them from the beginning. This is a lesson we've learned many times: it doesn't matter what the documentation says, people will continue to use a feature as long as it *appears* to work.
    99
    10 The most recent example of this pattern is the choice of Stig Atle Steffensen to use LAFS-FTPd even though I already told him that there were relevant limitations notes in the FTP-and-SFTP.rst document. Apparently he didn't read it, didn't notice the limitations part, or thinks those limitations are irrelevant to his use case. (Which I guess could be true for him, if he uses only ASCII filenames, only immutable files, doesn't have servers-of-happiness failures on his grid, etc.)
     10The most recent example of this pattern is the choice of Stig Atle Steffensen to use LAFS-FTPd even though I already told him that there were relevant limitations notes in the FTP-and-SFTP.rst document. Apparently he didn't read it, didn't notice the limitations part, or thinks those limitations are irrelevant to his use case. (Which I guess could be true for him, if he uses only ASCII filenames, only immutable files, doesn't have servers-of-happiness failures on his grid, etc.) In this tweet he wrote, it sounded like he wasn't aware of those other issues and thought that the only difference between FTP and SFTP was encryption:
     11
     12“ftp is unencrypted, sftp is encrypted, but if you run everything on 'localhost' then it does not matter if you use one over the other”
     13
     14— https://twitter.com/stigatle/status/397059080499789824
    1115
    1216This ticket proposes to deprecate and then remove the LAFS-FTPd implementation in favor of LAFS-SFTPd. The justification is that LAFS-FTPd lacks important functionality, like mutable files, error reporting, and non-ASCII filenames, not to mention confidentiality and integrity, and we have no plans to add it, because the FTP protocol can't support some of those features, and because we've already implemented all of that in LAFS-SFTPd and we think anyone who uses LAFS-FTPd could (with only a *little* added effort) switch to LAFS-SFTPd.