Subject: [ftpext] Musings on efforts outside of ftpext and ietf

From: "William F. Maton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:01:48 -0400 (EDT)

Hi all,

 	For a little over two years I've been doing quite a bit of work 
piecing together the odds and sods of what was the wu-ftpd daemon and its 
associated effort, the wu-ftpd development group.  In my journey (which 
has been limited by the amount of free time admittedly) I've discovered 
new RFCs and IDs that came and went, along with patches from the various 
linux distros and *BSDs.

 	To date I've been slowly working on updating the daemon, although 
much work seems to have gone on very quietly until the last CVS snapshot 
some four years ago ceased being available and the main website went into 
limbo.

 	Not sure who stated that FTP is headed to perhaps becoming a niche 
or even boutique protocol, but this reminded me of the herculean efforts 
by a team at the GLOBUS alliance (University of Chicago sponsored if I 
remember right) to extend the then last public release of the wu-ftpd 
codebase to raise FTP to a new level (they called it GridFTP).  They did 
produce a document outling the changes and resulting FTP extensions which 
I have archived here:

http://www.wfms.org/wu-ftpd/docs/drafts/GFD-R.020.pdf
http://www.wfms.org/wu-ftpd/docs/drafts/GFD.21.pdf

 	Last I chatted with them (1+ year(s) ago) they were interested in 
submitting this formally to the IETF if there was a formal process to 
submit through.  I'm not sure how willing they are today to submit it or 
even defend/propel it forward, but that's what spurred me on to keep tabs 
on any future ftpext work.  So it's nice to see there's at least a wee bit 
of interest again.

Anyways, looking forward to seeing how this will play out.

wfms