Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!VENERA.ISI.EDU!braden
From: braden@VENERA.ISI.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  FTP "STRU VMS" extension
Message-ID: <8903271958.AA02597@braden.isi.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 89 19:58:31 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22


Kenneth,

Your original message on this topic triggered a fairly constructive blast
of messages (about 35?).  I think you should plow ahead with your
proposal.  A useful approach might be to set up a "Birds-of-a-Feather"
session of VMS vendors at a future IETF meeting, to draft a spec.

I suggest you leave to the Protocol Czar Jon Postel the decision on
syntactic sugar, "STRU xxx" vs. "STRU O xxx" vs. "SITE STRU xxx", etc.
Don't waste any more time on it.  You (the set of VMS vendors) need to do
the hard work, documenting the contents and format for VMS (analogous to
Appendix I of RFC-959).

It should be noted that STRU P (PAGE structure) is in reality "STRU O
TENEX", or  "STRU O TOPS20."  FTP would have been cleaner as a
protocol and more powerful, I think, if we had adopted your idea years
ago, and recognized that STRU P was just one example of a class of
service that FTP ought to provide -- efficient operating-system-specific
transfers.

Bob Braden