FTP support

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 02:08:37PM -0500, TK Soh wrote:
> Is there a plan on supporting the ftp protocol? I don't see it on the
> bug tracker or the roadmap on wiki.

FTP is just about as supported today as it ever can be. In particular,
unbundle should handle ftp:// URLs.

We could teach old-http to do FTP range requests, but that would be
_even slower_ with no hope of ever being optimized.

And by pretty much any measure, FTP is dead as a protocol. It's
insecure, it has trouble with firewalls, it needs multiple sockets,
lots of extra round trips, and has been pretty much entirely killed
off by HTTP and SSH.

All that said, reasonable patches are still accepted.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.