Re: Distros (byte-ranging)

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

[Nothing like coming to a party late.]

On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 19:36, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> You travel in a far, far different circle than Suzie Desktop worker drone.

Yes.  That's why most "desktop worker drones" use download managers when
they start downloading large files on a regular basis, all of which
(that I've seen) support byte ranges.

FTP needs to die, period.  It's old and crufty and complicated.  It
encourages users to poke holes in their firewalls or whine to management
to order the hole poking.  It's unnecessarily complicated with its
data-port/control-port thing, which is why FTP servers are regular
topics on BugTraq.  Everything it can do, HTTP can do (to say nothing of
ssh and rsync), and without the complications and kludges.

That no Web browser supports byte ranges is unfortunate, but
irrelevant.  For Mozilla and the other open-source browsers, someone
needs to write the code to do byte ranges on interrupted downloads, if
they haven't already.  For the rest - welcome to Lesson #476 on why
source code is a good idea.  But lack of support for the feature in Web
browsers does not suddenly make FTP a good protocol.


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