RE: SSH File Transfer Protocol - draft-moonesamy-secsh-filexfer-00

The protocol is more of a file access protocol than a file transfer protocol.
This re-introduction of Version 3 of the protocol has the problem of not addressing the problem of exchanging text files on dissimilar systems. Though OpenSSH is a very common implementation there are other implementations on systems that use a line break mechanism that is different from Unix/Linux.  Many commercial users of SFTP implementations use it to transfer files between dissimilar systems and often encounter problems with text files that use different line break sequences. While the EXTENDED operation allows for vendor specific extensions, the problem is that they are VENDOR specific, and a company implementing a SFTP utility does not want to try to determine which implementation of the protocol they are dealing with and implement one of a variety of text file access methods.

Richard Whalen

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of S Moonesamy
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2013 8:19 AM
To: Peter Gutmann
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: SSH File Transfer Protocol - draft-moonesamy-secsh-filexfer-00

Hi Peter,
At 04:37 12-07-2013, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>Some background information on this decision would be useful, for example why
>restart work on it now, and why use version 3 of the protocol as the baseline?

There was a short discussion a few months ago about Section 6.1 of an 
expired SFTP  drafts.  I used Version 3 as the baseline as that is 
the version which OpenSSH implemented.  In my opinion it would be 
easier to document Version 3 as an IETF specification instead of 
trying to pursue the previous efforts.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy