Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 6385
ftpd needs SUPPORT_BROKEN_CLIENTS as ftp install and mc are broken
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:52 EDT
-Symptoms: Ftp upgrade from wu-ftp-2.6.0-1 server hangs after reading hdlist. mc-4.5.39-0.91 also hangs after copying file. Workaround: wu-ftpd-2.5 works fine and 2.6.0 recompiled with SUPPORT_BROKEN_CLIENTS works fine too. Conclusion: So ftp upgrade and mc seems to be the "broken clients" that wu-ftpd-2.6 has workaround for but that workaround unfortunatly was not compiled into wu-ftpd-2.6.0-1 update.
There are other broken clients out there too. For example, mirror 2.9, for which the following patch has been provided... ftp://ftp.wu-ftpd.org/pub/support/wu-ftpd-2.6.0-mirror-2.9.patch Eventually, all of those packages should be fixed (since they're the broken ones). Updating ftpd again, to re-break the protocol, seems like the wrong way to go, but it may be a reasonable short-term compromise if a lot of useful clients are broken.
This remedy (defining SUPPORT_BROKEN_CLIENTS) also solved a similar case opened today by one of our customers, using the standard ftp client available from the DOS prompt on a Windoze box. We use wu-ftpd-2.6.0-1.i386.rpm on RH 6.0. furio ercolessi/ Spin
We won't compile wu-ftpd with support for broken clients, as it causes instabilities in the transfers. See the various wu-ftpd readmes.
You are right. But nobody claims you should support broken clients. The point is that you must support all ftp clients that come with your own product. So you should either fix all broken clients shipped with RedHat 6.1 and make the update available *simultaneously* to wu-ftpd update or use SUPPORT_BROKEN_CLIENTS as a workaround. Otherwise you simply broke the working things instead of improving them. For example after wu-ftpd update RH6.1 ftp installation doesn't work anymore and THAT is the bug. If you don't like SUPPORT_BROKEN_CLIENTS then fix ftp install (and all other broken ftp clients shipped with RedHat if any). Best regards, Oleg