reget reput again...

[Darryl L. Miles]

Ben Lindstrom wrote (a very long time ago) :

 >The problem is in some cases the data being sent to you may be out of
 >order (thankful no sftp server does this yet). So reget/reput without RFC
 >clearifications can lead to bad file transfers.
 >
 >I'm trying to drag up in my mind which one was the problem... I believe
 >reput is fine since the client has control over the ordering. reget is
 >the troublesome some one without RFC clarifications stating out of order
 >transfers are denied.
 >
 >if the RFC get clarified to disallow out of order transfers then a cleaned
 >up version of this patch may not have a problem getting in.


It seems everyone body has a patch for this but it still can't quite 
make it into any official distribution.  Not wanting to stifle technical 
progress down surely the standards body have mechanism to allow new 
concepts to be experimentally deployed without affecting non-cooperating 
parties ?

Is it really necessary to get RFC clarification on this, maybe its 
useful to leave as-is and have the option to execute out-of-order for in 
uses.

Would it be possible to extend the channel initialisation options to 
negotiate a feature requesting "mandatory in-sequence execution of 
commands within this channel".  I'm not sure how these options are 
created or assigned but maybe use some OpenSSH naming space until a 
standard group either accepts or rejects the concept and assigns it a 
standard option name.

Non-conforming servers would not understand the option and the client 
could then disable the reget/reput commands from use in that session.

I do not know enough about the OpenSSH implementation to know if its 
possible for it to ever execute commands out of sequence with respect to 
the channel they are in nor the contraints this may pose to future 
maintainace of OpenSSH.

To confirm the scope of the option suggested, it says nothing about any 
other channel nor the order in which channels are attended to within the 
server, this stays as-is.


RFC ?  Please Cc your reply Thanks.


-- 
Darryl L. Miles