There’s this person within IETF who seems to possess endless energy and a never-ending wish to clean up tiny details within the IETF processes. He continuously digs up specifications that need to be registered or submitted again somewhere due to some process. Often under loud protests from fellow IETFers since it steals time and energy from people on the lists for discussions and reviews – only to satisfy some administrative detail. Time and energy perhaps better spent on things like new protocols and interesting new technologies.

This time, he has deemed that the FTP a FILE URI specs need to be registered properly, and alas he has submitted his first suggested update of the FTP URI.

From my work with curl I have of course figured out a few problems with RFC1738 that I don’t think we should just repeat in a new version of the spec. It turns out I’m not alone in thinking this work isn’t really good like this, and I posted a second mail to clarify my points.

We’re not working on fixing the problems with FTP URIs that are present in RFC1738 so just rephrasing those into a new spec is a bad idea.

We could possibly start the work on fixing the problems, but so far I’ve seen no such will or efforts and I don’t plan on pushing for that myself either.

Please tell me or the ftpext2 group where I or the others are wrong or right or whatever!