Followup on IETF72 discussion of FTP protocol extensions and updates
John C Klensin <klensin <at> jck.com>
2008-10-31 19:17:42 GMT
Hi.
Some notes were circulated prior to the Dublin meeting and we
had a brief discussion there about how (or if) to progress a
number of proposals for FTP extensions and clarifications.
The conclusion was that Barry and I should try to get a
preliminary draft charter together. It is attached.
While I won't try to reprise the information in the charter or
the discussion in July (see archives of this list with "FTP" in
the subject lines), let me give a personal impression of where
things stand at the moment.
I, and I believe Barry, are willing to invest some time in this
if others are interested and willing to work. With possibly one
exception, we are much less willing to try to twist arms to
persuade anyone that they should be interested. We also don't
see much point in standardizing anything for which multiple
implementations are unlikely, i.e., for any given one of the
proposals, we would expect any possible WG to determine whether
it is just an interesting idea or whether there is real,
multi-vendor or multi-implementer, interest in it.
On the other hand, if there are going to be multiple
implementations of the same general idea, I believe there is
merit in doing enough work in the IETF --presumably including
standardization-- to increase the odds that those
implementations will be interoperable. So, at least in my case,
the threshold for an FTP extension effort being worthwhile is
well below a conviction that something is a great idea that
everyone should immediately implement.
The schedule shown in the attached draft charter is very
aggressive, but based on the assumption that there really is a
core group of people who want to make this happen and will make
an investment in it. If that is not the case, I would
personally argue against getting a WG started -- this impresses
me as something we can either find the energy to do quickly or
cannot do at all.
As a personal comment, I believe that there is a significant
opportunity for IETF to add value to these proposals because
they are not the only way to do what they propose to accomplish.
To take two handy examples, it is not clear to me that a
single-stream FTP is FTP any more -- such a thing, if needed,
might better be modeled on TFTP, HTTP, SMTP with BDAT,or some
other arrangement. Similarly, when we discovered that we needed
to reduce the number of turnarounds in SMTP, we invented
pipelining, rather than, e.g., a MAILRCPT command that took a
list of addresses.
Anyway, comments welcome. My hope is to hold a brief discussion
during the Apps Area meeting and, if there is interest (i.e.,
people willing to work), that we organize a bar-BOF, tune the
charter, and get it back in the hands of the ADs before the IETF
week is over. That implies that anyone who is interested in
participating and willing to work but will not be in
Minneapolis, and anyone who can shed light in the implementation
status of these various proposals, should say so on this list
well before Nov 17.
john
File Transfer Protocol Extensions (ftpext)
Last Modified: 2008-10-30 (JcK, preliminary draft)
Chair(s):
# To be determined
Applications Area Director(s):
# Chris Newman <chris.newman <at> sun.com>
# Lisa Dusseault <lisa <at> osafoundation.org>
Applications Area Advisor:
# To be determined
Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: To be determined
To Subscribe: To be determined
Archive: To be determined
Description of Working Group:
The Standard File Transfer Protocol specification in RFC 959 has been
updated several times with command extensions of one sort or another,
including those described in RFCs 2228, 2640, 2773, and 3659. In the
last year or so, a series of additional Internet Drafts (listed below)
have been posted. This WG will examine the outstanding proposals,
determine which ones are worth pursuing, and bring the relevant ones
to Proposed Standard or, if more appropriate, Experimental.
If time and energy permit, the WG will also review the Proposed
Standard specifications identified above, revise and advance them to
Draft Standard as appropriate, and review and, if needed, update, the
FTP URI specifications.
Goals and Milestones:
January 2008 WG formation
March 2009 Decision on form and structure of the WG document
set, including which documents will be addressed.
June 2009 WG Last Call on WG document set
August 2009 IETF Last Call on WG document set
Internet-Drafts:
Streamlined FTP Command Extensions
draft-peterson-streamlined-ftp-command-extensions-05.txt
FTP Extension for Internationalized Text
draft-klensin-ftp-typeu-00.txt
FTP Extension Registry
draft-klensin-ftp-registry-00.txt
File Transfer Protocol HOST Command
draft-hethmon-mcmurray-ftp-hosts-01
FTP Extension Allowing IP Forwarding (NATs)
draft-rosenau-ftp-single-port-04
No Request For Comments
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