[JDEV] File Transfer Proposals

[Jay Curry]

On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 07:20, aliban at gmx.net wrote:
> 
> > If Jabber continues to rely on HTTP and eMail for
> > evangelizing itself, it is doomed to second class status. 
> > Jabber needs two things:
> > 
> > Native binary data transfers
> > and
> > URLs or URIs for persistent storage.
> > 
> > Seriously folks, name one protocol that can't transfer binary files,
> > somehow, someway.
> > 
> > --Tom Jackson
> > _______________________________________________
> 
> Yeah, both have advantages,
> we should support both!
>  - :) -

Talk has no built in mechanism for sending files. You may co-ordinate
with the person you are talking with, and send a binary file via
uuen/decode, or xxen/decode, however you can just as easily do that in
Jabber.

I would be surprised if you could not go through your services file and
find a dozen or so protocols that can't be used to transfer binary
files. Off the top of my head, I don't think it can be done with ntp,
echo, discard, daytime, netstat, qotd, chargen, ftp (ftp-data is the
protocol that transfers file in the ftp protocol) time, rlp, whois, or
re-mail-ck, and I haven't gotten past port 50. Granted you probably
won't try to implement these as File Transfer Agents in a client or on a
server. This also doesn't mean that you can't implement a protocol that
hides under one of those ports either. (Though under Unix it would have
to be a privledged user to access it.)

-Rusty