[fpc-pascal] FTP support gone - switch to HTTP ?

[Karoly Balogh]

Hi,

On Mon, 17 May 2021, Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal wrote:

> I know that Firefox will follow suit really soon (if they haven't already).
> Since Edge now also uses Chromium, they will soon also have this disabled.
>
> This wil surely cause problems for many users.
>
> So I think we should start making the FTP server downloads available through
> HTTP(s)
> instead of FTP. I also think we should do this for 3.2.2.
> (the pages are auto-generated from some base URLS, so this should not be a lot
> of work)

Agreed. This is something I wanted to raise already, but somehow it always
fell between the cracks.

> It should be sufficient to have a virtual host that points
> to the ftp directory of the current FPC's ftp dir.
>
> Charlie, is this an option for you ?

Certainly. See below.

> If you want, I can create a new DNS:
>
> downloads.freepascal.org
>
> which you can then use to set up the virtual host.
> I don't think HTTPS is a necessity, but if you prefer that is also good of
> course...

I think HTTPS is certainly a good practice in 2021, and it's easy to set
up with LetsEncrypt. So that shouldn't be a problem.

> When that is done, the links on the download page can be switched to http(s).

Yes, this is something I wanted to do Real Soon Now(tm). I'd actually keep
FTP enabled, as it doesn't hurt anything and it's still a thing for retro
downloads. But I planned to also offer HTTP and HTTPS.

The problem is, I also wanted to migrate away from the old FTP host
machine in the meantime, as that had disk I/O errors... but I never
finished setting up the new VM. I can attend to this this weekend. Is that
too late for 3.2.2, and we need it earlier? Maybe I can squeeze it in
during the week.

Charlie