[WBEL-devel] were these RPMs pulled from RHAS3?

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Tue, 2003-12-23 at 21:31, John Hinton wrote:

[snip]

> WOW!!! What an oversight for the webmasters among us! No ncftp??? 
> Whadupwidat? One of my most used tools and ncftpget is unique to my 
> knowledge? Sadly, this seems to be yet another tidbit of a move by 
> RedHat which I don't care for. Seems with all the forced package 

  While I won't defend the move Red Hat has made that spawned wbel, I
believe most of its technical decisions have been for the better (well,
okay, not the forced package installs and the bloatedness).  In this
case, I would encourage you to take a close look at lftp.
  To start with, to answer your question about ncftpget, no, it's not
unique: there is also an lftpget command that does basically the same
thing.
  Second, it's GPLed, unlike ncftp.  Red Hat has typically gravitated
toward GPLed software where it makes sense (but not universally --
witness pushing PostgreSQL[transactions,etc.] over MySQL[no
transactions, historically]).
  Third, it uses readline and keeps history even between sessions using
readline.  Though ncftp (I think) does have history features, they're,
well, weird.  I only say weird because it's different.  I prefer history
functionality that works like that in bash.  Heck, lftp even honors your
vi/emacs setting (I prefer vi settings).  Ncftp, because it is not GPL
compatible can never use the GNU readline library, since that library is
GPLed and not LGPLed.
  Fourth, though it's not really intrusive in ncftp, there's no
advertising for some commercial ftp server when you quit lftp or any
other time.  When I'm reading an online news site, I expect ads
(although they are severely reduced, thanks to privoxy ;-), but not in
basic command line tools.  It's just one of my pet peeves.
  I was a long time faithful ncftp user and thought I couldn't do with
out it.  Once I started using it, I never went back to the 'regular' ftp
client still bundled with Red Hat.  But, at least with older version of
ncftp, I found it horribly broken with some ftp servers.  So I went on a
hunt for a better client and found lftp even before Red Hat started
bundling it.
  Oddly enough, lftp was working great for a while and then suddenly
after one or another version upgrade, IT became broken in similar ways
that ncftp was broken.  I briefly switched back to ncftp and found it
had been largely fixed.  Soon, lftp stabilized as well, and I switched
back and haven't turned back in since.
  So, though both ncftp and lftp are probably on par feature-wise and
stability-wise (non-brokenness), the few small advantages of lftp make
me not miss ncftp all that much (GNU readline, GPL, others I'm sure I've
left out).  Try it, you just might like it.
  All of that said, if you *must* have ncftp, you can always grab the
rpm from Fedora.  If the binary rpm doesn't work out of the box, it
might work if you just 'rpmbuild --rebuild' the src.rpm.
-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets