FTP access to ctan.org down

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2020-12-04 at 18:20:05 +0100, Adam Purkrt wrote:

 > As a matter of fact, I have bought the domain texmf.net,
 > this summer, thinking it would be a good place for the said
 > source codes, which were buried deep in the tree on the ftp
 > server.
 >
 > I can or rather would like to transfer the domain to TUG.
 >
 > At the one hand, splitting the place where to place the TeX
 > related material may not be a good idea. At the other hand,
 > as I have said, the "real gold" - prof. Knuth's distribution
 > - is now rather hard to get to. Why not present it proudly,
 > at a domain respecting Metafont, which seems to be quite
 > often forgotten, when it is at least as interesting as TeX,
 > at least for me.

Hi Adam,
first of all, it is possible to get directory listings from http[s]
servers.  I just tried with lftp and my own web server.  It's
necessary to configure the server to create directory listings
on-the-fly.

This does not work if a particular directory contains an index.html
file.  In this case the server provides the content of this file
instead of a directory listing.  This is the case at CTAN.  If an
index.html file is present lftp even cannot change the directory
because it doesn't parse the HTML code.

There is at least one reason not to support FTP:  FTP requires that
you are logged in on the server.  You probably don't notice it if your
FTP client does the login in the background.  But the problem is that
only a particular number of users can be logged in at the same.  If
this number is exceeded users send mails to the maintainer and this is
quite annoying.

I suppose that Karl disabled FTP support due to the many complaints
from users.  The HTTP protocol does not require a connection and thus
is much more appropriate nowadays.

Another drawback of the FTP protocol is that downloading many small
files is utterly slow.  And many people are sitting behind a firewall
which blocks FTP.

If all you want is to make Knuth's files more prominent, the simplest
approach is to set up an HTTP server at http://texmf.net with a single
index.html file which redirects requests to the corresponding
directory on CTAN.  Because there is no need to deliver any files an
inexpensive Raspberry Pi with Debian and Apache is sufficient.

I must admit that I don't see the benefit of texmf.net.  CTAN provides
a search function which allows users to find Knuth's sources quickly.
Most people are not aware of texmf.net and consult CTAN anyway.  It's
not obvious that texmf.net contains Knuth's sources.  How do you want
to make people aware of it?

I agree that Knuth provided "real gold".  Everybody is aware of this
even without looking into the source code.  So I'm wondering what
you actually want to achieve.

IMO, the only reasonable way to point people to the "real gold" is an
entry in Wikipedia, which already exists.  I doubt that it's necessary
to point anybody to Knuth's sources because almost nobody is interested
in them and those who are know where to get them.

Please apologize if what I said is discouraging.  But what all users
want is a single place from where everything related to TeX can be
downloaded.  So everybody consults CTAN first anyway.

But you can check yourself.  Install Apache on your local machine and
provide an HTML file which redirects requests to Knuth's directory on
CTAN.  Then look into /var/log/apache2/access.log and you'll see that
nobody is interested.  Everybody consults CTAN in the first place.
You'll see that only search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. pollute
apache2/access.log, just because you mentioned texmf.net on a public
mailing list.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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