dolson@ADA20.ISI.EDU (Douglas M. Olson) (07/31/87)
Tedious but trivial for people who use these documents, I hope: I'm reading a draft test plan in order to spot whoppers and fix it up. In some areas I'm not extremely qualified...oh well. Problem: the draft for testing FTP calls for transmission of data in "text, ASCII, EBCDIC, and binary" to and from the test host, which will be a VAX/VMS system. Seems inspecific to me... I'm referencing what looks like MIL-STD 1780 page 9 (which is on page I-341 of the white books which I DON'T really know how to use). "5.2.1 ASCII format: ...is intended primarily for transfer of text files, except when both hosts would find the EBCDIC type more convenient. The sender converts the data from his internal format to the standard 8-bit NVT ASCII representation..." I'm still in trouble, but now I know its because I don't know FTP well enough. Question 1) When would a VAX/VMS FTP decide that EBCDIC is convenient? That is, is this likely/mandatory to be a user-selectable option in a reasonable FTP implementation on VMS? Seems like the default in this case is that if a VAX/VMS user gets a file from a machine which uses EBCDIC, it is the remote (EBCDIC) host's job to translate it before transmission, unless the user wants EBCDIC. If the VMS FTP user CANNOT specify EBCDIC, then I have to tell the test plan writers to fix this... comments from you folks anxiously solicited! Doug (dolson @ Ada20) -------