FTP Must Die

You might be amused to browse Chrome's implementation of FTP, which has separate modules for each of the different types of FTP servers you might encounter, as each emits the "ls -l" output in a different way and that is (I guess) the only way to get file sizes.

http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=tree;f=net/... see all the "directory listing" files.

The unit tests are full of scary cases like

  // Tests for "ls -l" style listing in Russian locale (note the swapped  
  // parts order: the day of month is the first, before month).

Re: FTP Must Die

#5

Post by TwoBit » Sun, Jan 29, 2012, 10:31 PM UTC

Time and time again I resort to FTP to transfer files between computers that won't talk to each other via system-provided file systems. MacWindows file sharing is so unreliable that I don't even try to use the system any more and just go straight to FTP. But yeah I hate the protocol itself.

Re: FTP Must Die

#6

Post by omh » Sun, Jan 29, 2012, 10:34 PM UTC

FTP is definitely outdated, and there are better uses in many circumstances. But I find some of these criticisms a bit odd.

The client listening was largely solved by 'passive' mode, and just about every server and client supports this now.

The firewall and NAT interaction is awkward, but most modern firewalls can deal with this automatically (as long as there's no SSL involved)

And yes, the RFC is 20 years old. But so are many RFCs for long-established veteran protocols that we use all over the net.

In many cases I'd be happy to see FTP replaced (all those anonymous FTP servers may as well be HTTP now), but it's really not that bad.

Re: FTP Must Die

#7

Post by charliesome » Sun, Jan 29, 2012, 10:34 PM UTC

> The LIST command is Maximum Bullshit. And I'm not even touching the subject of opening a data connection to send the list itself. Did you know that the specification doesn't tell anything about WHAT should be sent as the list?

Well it's a good thing that just about every FTP server in existence supports the MLSD command then.

Re: FTP Must Die

#8

Post by pygorex » Sun, Jan 29, 2012, 10:37 PM UTC

FTP is like religion: poorly designed at inception, implemented a thousand different ways and accepted as normal only because it's ubiquitous.

Re: FTP Must Die

#9

Post by thristian » Sun, Jan 29, 2012, 10:40 PM UTC

It's been a long time since I've been involved with transferring files to and from clients, but even five years or so ago I recall enabling IIS's WebDAV mode in preference to handling customer-support calls about getting FTP working. Of course, WebDAV is still a ball of horror, even if it's not as bad as FTP, so please let's all stick to SFTP from now on?

Re: FTP Must Die

#10

Post by wollw » Sun, Jan 29, 2012, 10:46 PM UTC

TwoBit wrote: post #5

Time and time again I resort to FTP to transfer files between computers that won't talk to each other via system-provided file systems. Mac Windows file sharing is so unreliable that I don't even try to use the system any more and just go straight to FTP. But yeah I hate the protocol itself.

Have you tried using SCP? I don't know if Windows comes with a client but a quick search turned up a few options. It is my goto method for transferring files these days but I admittedly don't use Windows.