Re: [Gnu-arch-users] sftp rename?

[James Blackwell]

> I'm not so sure about that; bad habits are hard to shake and the 'fish' 
> protocol has a HUGE advantage; it comes with the standard KDE distribution 
> which means at least 50% of the users will have it on his desktop.

I don't believe this number. Though kde is popular, I believe that gnome
is the default on the more common distributions and kde is presented as
an alternative. Thats not even counting the number of servers that don't
have either installed.

Though its a fallacy of locality, I don't even have kde on my machines.
On my servers I don't have X installed at all; on my laptops I have
gnome because of gnucash. However, *all* of my machines have ssh and
thusly sftp.

That all said... what is fish exactly? Is it just sftp under a different
name? If so, why not just hack up pfs to accept fish:// silently as
sftp? If its different, why not add a pfs method for fish? 


>> [AFAIK, the other programs/protocols called `sftp' are very old and not
>> really used anymore, so I don't think there's any active competition for
>> the name, just the slow fading of years-old memories...]
>
> The problem is that if you look up sftp you will find the /etc/services 
> reference, that is never going to go away. sftp the old one will be supported 
> by systems that like legacy stuff; like Solaris, SGI etc.
>
> So the naming will be duplicate for a long long time to come.
> The problem is very real; as we have seen a couple of times on this list. I 
> have not heard any good reason why this problem will go away in a reasonable 
> timeframe.

I don't think there are many here that would consider educating the
public that there is that old sftp nobody uses and this current one that
they should use as an onerous burden. If anything, sticking to our guns
would probably be better for the public as a whole; they should know
that there is a safe replacement for traditional ftp. 

-- 
James Blackwell        Using I.T. to bring more                570-407-0488
Owner, Inframix        business to your business        http://inframix.com

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