[CentOS] Two ftp clients? Why?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 17:28:43 UTC 2011


On 8/3/2011 11:48 AM, Warren Young wrote:
> On 8/3/2011 10:11 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Rsync barely works well on Windows
>> So what does???
>
> Please, can we drop the petty advocacy?

That was only partly petty - I'm interested in an answer to the question 
if there is one, and I don't think ftp is that great.

> As for rsync, there are a bunch of problems.
>
> One is that the source is highly unportable.  It heavily uses forks and
> pipes and such which have no direct equivalent under Windows.  All of
> that would have to be abstracted away as they've done in the
> first-quality ports mentioned above.

Yes, I've been surprised that no one has done a native port.  Hmmm, I 
wonder how hard it would be to adapt the rsync-in-perl flavor that is 
built into backuppc on top of the first-class ports of strawberry or 
active perl?

> Until then, you're forced to build and use it under Cygwin, which brings
> its own problems: heavyweight native API wrappers, its own bugs[*],
> incomplete POSIX semantics despite best efforts, etc.  (* Years ago,
> there was a really nasty bug in Cygwin signal handling that caused it to
> hang hard during transfers.  This was well known for years, and went
> undiagnosed in large part because of attitudes like yours.  "Well, it's
> Windows, what do you expect?")  BTW, I say this as a long-time Cygwin
> contributor and supporter.

Yes, I'm aware of the bug in the versions before the cygwin 1.7 release. 
  It didn't affect rsync-as-a-daemon or initiating an rsync command over 
ssh from the windows side - only rsync started under sshd.  But 
old/fixed bugs aren't particularly interesting (even though I did point 
them out about windows ftp because I saw them as something generic and 
predictable while long-standing cygwin bugs have been rare...).

> Bottom line: no, I would not recommend rsync to a Windows user.  It's
> fine today for those of us who already use Cygwin for other reasons, but
> to outsiders, it's a mess.

But what is the easier/better alternative for cross platform use?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com



More information about the CentOS mailing list