Fedora 40 firms up for release [LWN.net]

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 17, 2024 8:53 UTC (Wed) by vadim (subscriber, #35271)
In reply to: Fedora 40 firms up for release by eru
Parent article: Fedora 40 firms up for release

FTP can't die soon enough. It's terrible technology.

And if organizations care about it, maybe they can pay the wget project to maintain the FTP functionality.

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Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 17, 2024 21:10 UTC (Wed) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link] (6 responses)

>FTP can't die soon enough. It's terrible technology.
> And if organizations care about it, maybe they can pay the wget project to maintain the FTP functionality.

Thank you for clearly demonstrating the mentality in my above comment about Fedora Linux -- if the small cabal of leaders and/or systemd junkies doesn't rely on your feature, or finds something annoying even if it has no impact to them -- they'll have no compunctions about yoinking it, leaving a busy sysadmin to find out long after the fact that some expected behavior has changed and it's too late to fix it. Upon query or remark, they'll then be told to go pound sand for thinking that something like crontabs or *fricking FTP* might be something someone could be expected to rely on in a Linux distro.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 17, 2024 21:40 UTC (Wed) by vadim (subscriber, #35271) [Link] (2 responses)

FTP is a terrible protocol. I don't know why anybody uses it anymore.

* There's the NAT/firewall problems (okay, not a problem internally)
* There's the awful ASCII/binary mode that corrupts data.
* Awful support for SSL
* End of transfer is not signaled in any elegant manner. Socket is just closed.
* No protection against corruption.
* Opens a connection per file, leading to bad performance.
* Directory listings are non-standard, with a dozen possible varieties.
* Designed for interactive command-line usage and overall ill-fit for automation (some old school servers will want you to read the MOTD)

So yeah, FTP is dead and removed from web browsers for very good reasons.

Here's a good alternative: WebDAV. Runs on top of HTTP, doesn't have trouble with firewalls, doesn't have trouble with detecting ends of files, doesn't corrupt data, well supported out of the box everywhere, actually standard protocol, piggybacks on top of HTTP so saves you a second setup.

If you think the old relic is that valuable, convince your company to pay somebody to maintain this.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 17, 2024 22:04 UTC (Wed) by vstinner (subscriber, #42675) [Link]

FTP client also sends the password in clear text, which is not great in terms of security.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 18, 2024 8:51 UTC (Thu) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

> If you think the old relic is that valuable, convince your company to pay somebody to maintain this.

Or just use one of several ftp clients (ncftp, lftp, filezilla, ...) that the fictional cabal has somehow forgotten to remove from the distribution.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 17, 2024 22:06 UTC (Wed) by vstinner (subscriber, #42675) [Link] (1 responses)

Red Hat is not behind every single choice in the open source community. I don't see the relationship between Wget2 and systemd.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 18, 2024 7:16 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Agreed: Red Hat isn't behind every choice. Now that Fedora is effectively further upstream, even less so.
Fedora has a thriving set of developers of its own.

One thing, however: as a relative outsider, my viewpoint is that no-one should _rely_ on Fedora to be stable. It is a cutting edge release for things to be tried. If you want to rely on it long term - say as the basis for Amazon Linux 2023 which seems to be put together from three Fedora releases and CentOS stream - you're doing it wrong, given that the lifecycle is 13 months.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 24, 2024 0:42 UTC (Wed) by motk (guest, #51120) [Link]

A cabal? Really? Touch grass.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 18, 2024 10:21 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] (1 responses)

FTP is fine - I know because I wrote a whole FTP server from scratch. The original mode where the FTP server would connect back to the client (active mode) was a bad idea in hindsight, but every FTP client and server now defaults to passive mode.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 18, 2024 15:39 UTC (Thu) by vadim (subscriber, #35271) [Link]

Passive mode still leaves problems server-side.

For instance for a server behind NAT, you need a kernel module to rewrite packets. This is ugly, makes firewalling harder, doesn't work with SSL, and is a serious performance impact on fast networks because it can require very extensive packet inspection and rewriting.

Fedora 40 firms up for release

Posted Apr 18, 2024 15:04 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

I wanted to make the same comment but in respect of WARC support. At least there are many other options for FTP clients.

In WARCs case, it seems that it wasn’t removed so much as never implemented in wget2 in the first place: it seems wget2 is a different code lineage to wget1.