[sword-devel] Firefox to remove support for the FTP protocol | ZDNet

[Greg Hellings]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 11:29 AM David Haslam <dfhdfh at protonmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Caleb for so succinctly expressing the point that I vaguely
> hinted at.
>
> This is something that needs our urgent attention.


How does it need our attention? We have supported HTTP and HTTPS for a very
long time for any versions of the engine built with cURL. The option to
support FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS is left up to the repository manager. Going
down our standard list of repositories:

✔ https://www.crosswire.org/ftpmirror/pub/sword/
✔ http://ftp.bible.org/
✗ http://ftp.xiphos.org/
✗ http://ftp.ibt.org.ru/
✗ https://ftp.ebible.org/

All the repos under CrossWire control are already fully accessible over
HTTP(S). Xiphos, IBT, and eBible do not appear to be, from what I can tell,
but that is up to their own maintainers if they wish to enable that access.
With Apache or Nginx (or most of the popular static site servers out there)
enabling it is very easy. I have some automation that will enable it for
Nginx, if anyone needs help with that.

However, there isn't anything for CrossWire to do. We don't rely on the
browser for communication, so Mozilla or Chromium's plans to remove their
code for it are moot. We have our own implementation internally and we rely
on cURL if it's available at compile time. HTTP/HTTPS support was added to
the engine and repositories back when the iOS client was first created
because the iPhone doesn't permit FTP egress from the device (if memory
serves) but it does allow HTTP/HTTPS egress. There is little to no need to
remove the support when it exists already, and adding HTTP/HTTPS support to
each repository is already possible.

--Greg


> David
>
> Sent from ProtonMail Mobile
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 16:23, Caleb Maclennan <caleb at alerque.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think code sharing code with browsers is even the issue here, the
> issue is the FTP ecosystem is going away — and surprising quickly for
> something that used to be so ubiquitous. I've already bumped into several
> ISP's just flat out blocking all FTP traffic, probably because they didn't
> know of or care about any ongoing uses for it. With browsers dropping
> support, it's validity as a protocol is going to quickly go by the wayside.
> All existing FTP based systems should be ported to HTTPS (and only 'S') at
> the earliest convenience.
>
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 5:22 PM Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 2:20 AM David Haslam <dfhdfh at protonmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The writing is on the wall for FTP.
>>>
>>> Firefox to remove support for the FTP protocol | ZDNet
>>> https://flip.it/AY-TTt
>>>
>>> How will this trend affect how we design and communicate?
>>>
>>
>> Since we don't use or rely on Mozilla or Chrome code, I imagine it won't
>> affect much of anything.
>>
>> --Greg
>>
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>> Sent from ProtonMail Mobile
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