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Comment by vtbassmatt | Hacker News Reader

As the PM who ended up finally killing it, I (on behalf of the team) thank you for your "joke" that wasn't really a joke. It did help some customers who had legacy SVN workloads land on GitHub.

I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work.

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> I wanted to announce this on April Fool's Day, but just couldn't make the timing work.

Thank you for not doing that. Releasing a wacky feature on April 1 is funny. Discontinuing a service that people might rely on is distinctly un-funny.

I disagree. It would probably prompt a few support calls and emails, but otherwise I think it would be great.

I don't read the news on April 1 because it got old decades ago. Sunsetting a service, rather than killing it outright, is a kindness. Making the announcement on April 1 means people will miss it or ignore it. Uncool.

“A few support calls” = At least a few companies who have unnecessarily faced major enough issues that they worked through internal investigations of many different pieces in the stack and then eventually decided to reach out to external support for GitHub, potentially having reached out to other vendors’s support because some PM thought it would be “funny”.

I don’t actually think it would cause any problems personally, but I’m astonished at the flip dismissal of a “few support calls”.

Instead add FTP version control support with the ability to create backup files.

i'm still angry at mozilla and google for deprecating that, being able to set up a simple anonymous FTP server and send normies a link to it that they can open in their browsers was really convenient. Now if I want to use FTP i have to explain to them that they have to copy it into the windows file explorer or download filezilla.

Why not an HTTP server with a directory index?

FTP is a pretty clunky protocol: it's round-trip heavy, not friendly to NAT on the client-side when you don't use PASV, not friendly to firewalls on the server-side when you do. I'm not sure what benefits there are to it these days.

https://github.com/sigoden/dufs

A file server that supports static serving, uploading

MIT/Apache-2 in Rust

Yeah a simple `python3 -m http.server` works pretty well.

Python http.server doesn't handle concurrent requests, so it works pretty well until it doesn't. Example don't use it to serve an ISO to iLO/iDRAC, boot will fail.

I believe this was updated in a recent version of Python to use threads.

Ftp is dead, just enterprise and mid level companies won't let go. It boggles the mind why it has persisted so long.

Though I typically use rsync these days, FTP can be useful for copying files to and from a Linux server when the client is a Windows machine.

Recent windows versions natively support ssh, scp, sftp on the command line.

The types of companies that use Windows will atypically take a long time to get on a modern version for their stack. Desktop fleet withstanding.

There is tons of old crappy software that cannot understand anything else, so it persists. Like fax machines.

But how can we pop a box without have wuftpd installed?

I didn't even use it all that often but, yes, I also feel like this was useful to have. Every now and again I come across an ftp site that I now have to copy into a dedicated program instead.

I made one of these online tool from which you can create deep links to an FTP server like this: https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=ftp&hostname=ftp.gnu.o...

It works not only with ftp but sftp, s3, webdav and pretty much any other storage backend you can think of.

Not just FTP is being deprecated, but WebDAV (DeltaV) is deeply based on Apache's mod_dav_svn subversion integration as well. WebDAV maps over regular HTTP GET/POST routes to provide quite sophisticated versioning of web resources at the same endpoint using just additional HTTP verbs (though also is/was often routed at URLs with a special prefix).

source.php.old.ReallyOld.bak.thistimeitsold.old

I wonder how much PHP source code is publically reachable out on the Internet because people would do this without realizing that modphp wouldn't treat it like a PHP file anymore, so an HTTP request to it would cause it to dump the file's source code.

index.php~ for anyone using Emacs

Exactly. When it is a small change, just comment it out. But when it’s a large change, create a .old.backup.2013-12-07.dontdelete.

source.php_newnewnew

I tip my hat to your team and I owe you all beers, my friends. You are doing the lord's work.

I love the internet dearly

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