🚀 go-pugleaf

mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:

>At present nearly all public domain files in the netland are available
>with the FTP protocol. This is a widely used but not very comfortable
>solution.

There have been a number of relatively recent improvements, allowing FTP
servers to send informational messages concerning the contents of
directories, etc. For an example, here's an excerpt from the motd from
gatekeeper.dec.com:

>     Extended commands available via:
>        quote site exec COMMAND
>     Where COMMAND is one of:
>        index PATTERN   - to glance through our index (uses agrep).  example:
>                          ftp> quote site exec index emacs

For another example, an excerpt from a session with ftp.uu.net shows an
informational message for a directory:

    ftp> cd stone
    250-Files within this subtree are automatically mirrored from
    250-gate.fzi.de:/pub/OBST
    250-
    250 CWD command successful.

It should be simple to extend the site-specific commands to allow users
to request descriptions of files, etc. The problems I see are:

- keeping a lot of file descriptions up-to-date is a pain in the rear.
  A lot of times you just can't grab the readme file out of an archive;
  I'm not sure how many archive maintainers have time for much more than
  that.

- the user interface is atrocious - "quote site describe <file>" isn't a
  very intuitive way to get information on a file. A better FTP client
  would fix that.

Another solution would be to go with something like the Andrew File
System, so that you could examine files individually using native
operating-system operations, rather than being stuck within some
archive-browsing-specific application.

>What do you believe OSI has to offer as an alternative?

I know I'm going to inflame some of the OSI people out there, but I
would suggest: not a whole hell of a lot. FTAM doesn't give you anything
that FTP doesn't, except the ability to translate even more obsolete and
odd file formats that no one uses for archives, since usually files are
stored in some bundled, compressed form. It's likely that document
lookup systems, on the other hand, might not have enough
operating-system file support to handle the task. Finally, the
likelihood that FTAM will come into widespread usage as a remote
file-mounting system - ala NFS and AFS - is very low. In a perfect world
it would be even lower.

>[lots of good ideas for archive-browsing deleted]

You might try getting a copy of ftpd and hacking some of your
ideas into it. Combine it with a client user interface that hides
the "quote site" incantation from users, and see what people think... 

				Peter Desnoyers
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