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Re: Theads and FTP

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On 12/5/2011 7:33 AM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:14:21 -0800, Daniel Pitts
> <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net>  wrote, quoted or indirectly
> quoted someone who said :
>
>> Why not look up the RFC on the FTP protocol?
>
> Because they are written to impress rather than inform.  It is far too
> easy to misinterpret them.

Most RFCs written nowadays are written with the mindset of detailing a 
protocol specification, and often include things like discussion on 
security impacts, i18n concerns, etc. Any modern RFC is pretty good 
about detailing how the protocol looks, although there are certainly 
cases where the real world doesn't agree with the RFC (e.g., active FTP 
frequently runs afoul of firewalls in practice, and the use of text 
transfers is questionable in practice). For the most important old 
protocols, there is often a large number of newer RFCs that update them 
with better support for security and i18n concerns.

It also has been my experience as a major consumer of RFCs that the 
question of misinterpretation is not so much a result of RFC text being 
wrong but how to deal with idiot software that puts literal crap on the 
network in violation of RFCs--a casualty of server software playing the 
"be liberal in what you accept" game and accepting many things in pretty 
gross violation of the legal specifications, which people come to rely on.

And lest you think that it's merely a case of "I'm not looking at the 
right RFCs", my experience comes heavily from an email/newsgroup 
background, so I wager that the RFCs I have to work with are probably 
among the most-heavily violated RFCs in existence.

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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Theads and FTP Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-12-03 20:31 -0800
  Re: Theads and FTP Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-12-04 13:14 -0800
    Re: Theads and FTP Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-12-04 22:06 -0500
      Re: Theads and FTP Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-12-05 14:58 +0000
        Re: Theads and FTP Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-12-05 22:01 -0500
          Re: Theads and FTP Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li> - 2011-12-06 21:07 +0000
    Re: Theads and FTP Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-12-05 05:33 -0800
      Re: Theads and FTP Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-12-05 09:29 -0800
      Re: Theads and FTP Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-12-05 12:29 -0600
        Re: Theads and FTP Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> - 2011-12-06 11:28 -0600
      Re: Theads and FTP Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-12-05 22:00 -0500
      Re: Theads and FTP Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li> - 2011-12-06 22:16 +0000
  Re: Theads and FTP Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-12-04 22:04 -0500

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