Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

No More FTP At Debian (debian.org)

Posted by msmash on from the out-of-fashion dept.

New submitter Gary Perkins writes: It looks like anonymous FTP is officially on its way out. While many public repositories have deprecated it in favor of HTTP, I was rather surprised to see Debian completely drop it on their public site. In a blog post, the team cited the FTP's lack of support for caching or acceleration, and declining usage as some of the reasons for their decision.

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. HTTP is faster to connect by fred6666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Every time I used FTP in my sources.list, it was slower to connect. The whole apt-get update process could therefore be twice as long on FTP, compared to HTTP. Even though I guess once connected, the file transfer protocol should be more efficient.

    1. Re:HTTP is faster to connect by dunkelfalke · · Score: 3, Interesting

      FTP convoluted? Seriously? I have recently written an FTP client, it was by far the easiest protocol I have ever implemented. Hell, XMODEM is more complicated.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  2. Farewell FTP by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Along with many other antiquated protocols, FTP is now going the way of gopher, telnet and other such early protocols the internet used.

    FTP was a neat tool in its day, with lots of anonymous-enabled repositories of free software (and sometimes not-so-free.) Gone are the days of highjacking a server with lots of disk to make it a file dump via FTP.

    As more repositories close down, I wonder how they will be replaced? I have not seen much in the way of clearing houses for free software in web-page format, yet. Sure, a lot of linux distros are hosted up on websites, but rarely do you find indexes like you can with FTP easily.

    I'll miss the days of using somewhat questionable 'ftp search' websites that tried to scrape as much info as they could from anonymous-enabled FTP servers around the globe.

    You'll be missed, good ol' FTP.