[Foundation] Call For Arbitration: File Transfer

[Justin Karneges]

On Monday 25 August 2003 11:05 am, Ryan Eatmon wrote:
> As the Council Chair it is my role to inform the membership about our
> decision for the Call for Arbitration on the File Transfer topic.

And SI was chosen.  This fine, but SI is not perfect.  Let's get it into 
shape.

> 3) How do you handle a failure during a stream transfer?
>
> REL requires that you try and send the file again and again until it
> succeeds, or you hit a keep alive limit.
>
> SI just stops and the file is not transfered.  It is left up to the user to
> resend it.
>
> It is simple enough for an author to support automation within their Client
> without requiring it in the protocol.

Could you explain how you plan to automate this?  It has been noted repeatedly 
by Aleksey and myself that SI is not capable of doing this properly.  I don't 
see how a council meeting makes the problem magically disappear.

I already proposed a solution for this, which is to add an optional 
<keepAlive/> element into <si> that behaves just like REL's.  However, this 
has yet to be added into JEP-95.

> We have also discussed a few other Profiles that we think would be simple
> to create using this methodology, one of them being JEP-105 Tree Transfer
> Stream Initiation Profile for transferring entire directory structures and
> not just single files at a time.

As I stated in a previous email to standards-jig regarding JEP-105:

"Maybe I'm dense, but why is this even an SI profile?  It doesn't appear to 
use a stream at all."

-Justin