Subject: Re: draft-ietf-secsh-publickeyfile-00.txt

From: Frank da Cruz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 15:49:18 EST

> Transferring plain ASCII files is becoming extremely rare.
> ...
> I may be an exception, but I have never, ever, in my 20 years of intensely
> using computers (including some years of VAX, UNIVAC, Burroughs mainframe
> use, and several years of CP/M, MSDOS and Windows use, and having worked
> with full-text databases and newspaper editorial systems several years,
> including many ten-hour kermit transfers over serial lines) intentionally
> transferred a file using ASCII mode.
> 
Then I would guess that you probably never transferred text (e.g. email,
program source code, batch jobs) between an IBM mainframe (EBCDIC) and an
ASCII-based system.  In this case, binary mode is completely useless and an
inappropriate default.

I would also guess that you don't bother with Finnish or other languages
where letters have diacritics or are not Roman letters; here too, binary
mode is not particularly helpful.

> I will make the claim that automatically defaulting to ASCII mode is
> HARMFUL, and is becoming MORE HARMFUL as time goes by.  If the user
> explicitly wants to convert, he/she can then specify conversion type to
> the client (e.g., convert for VAX/VMS).
> 
We used to default to text mode.  But in recognition of the trends you have
cited, we switched the default to binary some years ago.  But those trends
don't eliminate the need for text mode becuase it's not just a mere question
of record format conversion, but also of character-sets: ASCII/EBCDIC,
UTF8/ISO8859-1, ISO Latin-Cyrillic/KOI8, etc etc.  Sending around ZIP files
and tarballs in binary mode doesn't help a bit.

The ideal situation occurs when the file tranfer agent can switch between
text and binary mode automatically, without the user having to know anything
about it, so even an inappropriate default will have little or no impact.

- Frank