On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 07:34:09PM +0100, Bengt Richter wrote: > I would prefer something that fits in with mes-philosopy. > ftp seems old and simple, so I would vote for push-back > to fix the ftp client involved.
FTP is more complicated than HTTP in that it requires the use of multiple connections. Additionally, it's often blocked on corporate networks, whereas HTTP/S is never going to be blocked (HTTPS anyways). Based on experience in Guix, we have never had bug reports from users who could not access sources over HTTP/S, but there have been several reports of problems using FTP. The HTTP/S ports 80 and 443 are basically the only ports you can depend on being open on a network that is connected to the internet. The creator of curl compares them here: https://daniel.haxx.se/docs/ftp-vs-http.html
