Subject: Ftp-WG: Re: draft-ietf-ftpext-mlst-10 comments

From: "Janet Wolf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 10:17:55 -0500

Bryan,
My FTP client issues FEAT during login.   My client looks for both LANG and
UTF8 in the FEAT reply.   As you know, the LANG portion includes its
current language with an asterisk (e.g., LANG en*,fr,de).  My client
extracts the language marked with the asterisk and sends that LANG command
to the server (i.e. LANG en).  At that point, per RFC 2640, the server and
my client have just negotiated UTF-8 encoding of pathnames.

As for my server, it always includes UTF8 and LANG en* in the FEAT reply
(subject to configuration options).     My server supports LANG, but the
only language on offer is English.   RFC 2640 says a server must support
the LANG command, but it doesn't require the server to support more than
one language.  The point of supporting LANG in this way is to allow a
client to negotiate UTF-8 encoding with my server.

I am very curious where you got the idea of using OPTS UTF8 ON?

Cheers,
Janet C. Wolf

"Bryan Starbuck" <[email-masked]> on 07/05/2001 11:10:37 AM

To:   "FTPEXT Working Group" <[email-masked]>, Janet
      Wolf/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS, <[email-masked]>
cc:
Subject:  RE: Ftp-WG: Re: draft-ietf-ftpext-mlst-10 comments

I'm the owner for the graphical FTP support in Internet Explorer and I
found the same problem.  I found from extensive backward compatibility
tests that the server and client can't start using UTF8 by default.
Therefore, I need the client and server to handshake before they can
safely start using UTF8.

I do this by having the server advertise that it can handle UTF8 by
returning "UTF8" for the FEAT command.  The client will then send "OPTS
UTF8 ON".  If the server returns a successful reply value, both sides
know that everything from then on is in UTF8.

I know that doesn't fully comply with RFC 2640 but it solves the
backward compat issue.  It also works well with FEAT/OPTS.

I would love to hear how other people solved this problem.

-Bryan
(Sorry the reply is so late...)

======================================
Bryan Starbuck - [email-masked]
Software Design Engineer
Windows XP Shell

-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Clements [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 5:40 AM
To: FTPEXT Working Group
Subject: Ftp-WG: Re: draft-ietf-ftpext-mlst-10 comments

With respect to Sergey's recent post.

I can't comment on the internationalization issues.

I do think that the pathname format being sent by the server, or the
client, should be un-ambigious.

The client should be able to tell the server "I'll accept UTF-8, I can
send
UTF-8" and the server should be able to say "I can send UTF-8, I can
receive UTF-8".

I know the LANG option was mentioned as a way to do some of this,
but I think it would be good to eleminate "guess" and path-type
determination based on inspection.

Brad Clements,                [email-masked]   (315)268-1000
http://www.murkworks.com                          (315)268-9812 Fax
netmeeting: ils://ils.murkworks.com               AOL-IM: BKClements