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Alexis flexibeast at gmail.com

Sun Jul 11 17:06:11 BST 2021

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Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater at gmail.com> writes:

Well, maybe Gemini browsers should add some of these other

protocols so that users can do more, with better-suited things.

Yes, i'm not aware of any reason why SFTP[a] functionality has to be presented with a command-line interface like e.g. ftp(1), or a graphical interface like e.g. Filezilla. Once there's a wrapper for SFTP in one's programming language of choice[b] - and SFTP is so well-established that there's more likely to be a wrapper than not - the UX can be oriented towards whichever group of users the dev(s) wish. And the conscious simplicity of Gemini protocol make its easier for different devs to create and maintain clients supporting different demographics.

Upthread, ~ew wrote:

Apparently a lot of people think, but how can I make it do X or

Y too? And in my not so humble opinion, there are protocols

better suited for some or these things.

Fwiw, i agree. In this particular case, the fact that SFTP has an implementation in the OpenSSH suite means that the protocol has had many security-conscious people reviewing it and thinking about it - at the very least, far more than any new Gemini-oriented protocol for uploads is likely to have for quite some time. It makes sense to me to leverage a battle-hardened (even if not, of course, flawless) protocol, and find a friendly way of presenting it to non-tech users.

Alexis.

[a] SFTP rather than SCP because, as the SFTP Wikipedia page notes:

SFTP attempts to be more platform-independent than SCP; with

SCP, for instance, the expansion of wildcards specified by the

client is up to the server, whereas SFTP's design avoids this

problem. While SCP is most frequently implemented on Unix

platforms, SFTP servers are commonly available on most

platforms. The file transfer is fast in SCP when compared to the

SFTP protocol due to the back and forth nature of SFTP

protocol. In SFTP, the file transfer can be easily terminated

without terminating a session like other mechanisms do.

SFTP is not FTP run over SSH, but rather a new protocol designed

from the ground up by the IETF SECSH working group. It is

sometimes confused with Simple File Transfer Protocol.

[b] A quick search came up with https://github.com/pkg/sftp for Go, https://docs.rs/ssh2/0.3.2/ssh2/index.html for Rust, https://pypi.org/project/pysftp/ for Python, etc.; though i don't develop in any of those languages, so can't comment on the quality of these wrappers.