[ftputil] Thanks & suggestion

[Randolph Fritz]

[forgot to CC this, sorry]

On Jun 24, 2005, at 3:43 AM, Stefan Schwarzer wrote:


> Randolph:
>
> Sorry for the delay. I was away from home for almost a week.
>
> On 2005-06-18 02:39, Randolph Fritz wrote:
>
>
>> Just started using ftputil and I'm delighted with it.  Thank you for
>> writing it and making it freely available!
>>
>>
>
> Thanks for your thanks :-)
>

You're welcome. :-)


>> Suggestion: for servers which support them, which seem pretty common,
>>
>
> The FTP server of my provider doesn't seem to support them. PureFTPd,
> installed locally here, has support. It would be intesting to know  
> what
> ratio of FTP servers has MLSx support and how much they are in use.
>

NetBSD's ftpd supports MLSx, so does Darwin's.  I first encountered  
MLSx using PureFTPd at the large web site provider lunarpages.com.   
So I think they're fairly common.


> That would bloat the design a bit.  [...]  I wonder if it's worth  
> the effort and complication of the design to implement this because  
> only one user of ftputil has complained that neither of the current  
> two parsers worked.  [...] I follow the YAGNI principle
>

There's something to be said for this.  On the other hand, I expect  
parsing MLSx output, when it is available, to be much more reliable  
than parsing LIST output, which after all has no specified form at all.


> On the other hand, it _might_ be that people haven't been able to use
> ftputil due to its current parsing limitations and never sent a  
> feature
> request.
>

As an old QA engineering and beta tester, I think this is very  
likely; when one free program doesn't work, I usually just try another.

Anyhow, thanks for the reply!

Randolph