Re: Theads and FTP
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