Re: Distros (byte-ranging)

[Damacus <damacus@bastion.yi.org>]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 08:20:22PM +0000, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> > I would hope that given a URL for a large file, any sane person would
> > use something like wget to download it, not a browser (which wasn't
> > made for downloading files).
> 
> I would think that anyone seeing a URL would be doing so in a browser in the 
> first place - like when they are visiting a website or reading their email.
> 
> I'd bet money that very, very, very few people *stop* using a browser
> to launch a command-line tool to download a URL - instead of just 
> "clicking on the link". And no browsers I know of call an external browser
> to follow a URL when they already know quite well how to do so on their own.

Pfft.  Reading email in a browser... *skin crawls, shivers*  mutt, thanks. ;)  Most of the people I know do in fact fetch large files with wget or curl.  I even catch my boss copying URLs and running curl on his MacOSX box.

I like FTP as a user simply because it was made for file xfers and I can throw my own navigation commands at it from a command line, and list exteded information for files, yadda yadda yadda.  

In this case, however, anonymous access.. I prefer using a HTTP server simply because an FTP server is intrinsically more insecure, and I only want real users using FTP.

> So, while your instructions are efficient, most users are not, and merely do 
> whatever involves the least amount of effort and thought. Thus, my noting
> that they are very, very, very likely to be using a general browser, which do 
> not support restarts. QED.

You're right, they'll probably use whatever is most handy.. a web browser for example.. but after getting burned a few times (their browser crashes and loses the file) they're going to switch to a different program, not a different protocol.  I say this because the only FTP tool most people have is, well, their crash-prone web browser.

The only ftp program you get with Windows, and MacOSX are commandline based interactive tools.  Not easy for the sane user to knock out UNIX commands.. but when someone asks, and you tell them to type "wget" followed by the URL (no FTP commands or login crap to get mixed up) they are able to do it.

And, of course, it goes without saying that a user's not always going to be able to hop onto an FTP server with the file they want.

Mike

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