8 ms·

IIUC the `scp` cmdline will still exist it'll just use the sftp protocol behind the scenes instead of the eco protocol. Note that the deprecation is about the p

IIUC the `scp` cmdline will still exist it'll just use the sftp protocol behind the scenes instead of the eco protocol. Note that the deprecation is about the protocol not the cli.

herodoturtle 6y ago
Thanks for clarifying. I felt the same as OP above. The title of this post totally through me off.
- klohto 6y ago
  Why not just read the article?
  - alias_neo 6y ago
    In my, and possibly their defence, I read the article, and missed the one line in the second to last paragraph which states that it is the protocol being replaced. The way the article opens, coupled with the title makes that an easy point to miss.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      Yeah it seems like that would be in the first paragraph.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Burying the lede. We are all bad at it, but developers seem to be worse than most. Maybe it’s all the bottom up thinking we do.
      - kstrauser 6y ago
        I've become a big fan of military-style Bottom Line Up Front writing[0]. In this case, the article could have started with "we're deprecating the scp protocol and updating the scp command line utility to use the sftp protocol instead." [0] https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/ https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/
  - LeCow 6y ago
    > OP: ask innocent question to clarify the article > You: understand the article better!
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    To confirm if headlines are accurate?
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Pretty solid plan generally speaking I think.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
DarkmSparks 6y ago
I doubt this will be accepted. It'll break a lot of valid functionality that relies on it, and the only case I can see presented as to why is for situations when servers choose to offer scp when they should have chosen to offer sftp. Complaining that some people hand out shell access and this creates a "problem" that they gave people access to shell commands verges on ridiculous.
- hannob 6y ago
  It looks like the openssh main dev is positive about this change: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/pull/194#pullrequestreview-450344807 https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/pull/194#pullreq... That sounds like it will probably be accepted after a few more minor fixes.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  You can deprecate something while still letting people add it back into their PPA manually. If you absolutely need an deprecated tool, no one's going to stop you: it's linux. Heck, just com,pile it from source and be on your merry unsupporteed way.
  - monoideism 6y ago
    Yeah, and lose the security updates? I much prefer the status quo. Don't agree that this change is necessary.
    - TheRealPomax 6y ago
      The scp protocol is literally deprecated: what do you not agree with? The idea (and already being worked on) is to change the scp command's underlying code so that it behaves exactly the same as before, all your scripts will keep working just fine, it just won't use the now dead scp protocol under the hood and will instead use the universally supported sftp protocol.
      - monoideism 6y ago
alias_neo 6y ago
Thanks for pointing that out, even after reading the article I had not understood that to be the case. I suspect doing so will have issues of its own however.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  I agree; the headline simply says "deprecating scp" which suggests that the command "scp" would be deprecated :)
lloeki 6y ago
In practice many times I end up using: ssh cat /foo/bar > /bar/baz ssh tar c /foo | tar x -C /bar mostly because variants such as vagrant ssh or docker-machine ssh, cross-product with the remote target being any weird platform like solaris or a limited busybox or has sftp disabled
- jcranmer 6y ago
  In practice, tar c | ssh tar x can actually be far faster than scp -r, especially when you have a lot of small files.
  - sethhochberg 6y ago
    I've found many people either forget (or never knew) that pipes have a buffer, and that buffers are very useful when you are dealing with potentially bursty throughput. In a previous team where we dealt with shipping around lots of ZFS snapshots (where both the performance of reading from disk can vary based on the ARC and filesystem metadata) and occasionally using VPN tunnels on public internet links, pv to get even larger pipe buffers than standard was often a huge performance equalizer. Readers read as fast as they can, writers write as fast as they can, and the buffer massages any variability in the middle. https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv
    - saltcured 6y ago
      It's not just the buffer, it is the PIPE. Specifically, pipelining that streams one file after another, without an idle period of waiting for the round-trip acknowledgements of one file receipt prior to sending the next. Using rsync over ssh has the same massive benefit for transferring many files, even if there is no existing data to make use of its differential transfer mechanisms. (Those extra mechanisms are usually beneficial in WAN scenarios as well, except when you have high speed links, in which case blasting the full files may be faster than doing the IO to figure out comparisons and skip transfer.) Edited: adjusted confused punctuation.
- edgyquant 6y ago
StillBored 6y ago
Which probably won't work in a lot of cases. I just got burned by the very minimal raspian ssh server they ship by default. First it didn't support the authentication method I wanted to use, and then it didn't have any port forwarding ability. I'm betting it doesn't have sftp support either.
- neop1x 6y ago
  Yes, many embedded devices run Dropbear where built-in scp support is often enabled. But most systems probably won't have sftp binary from openssh installed ( https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/nas/sftp.server https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/nas/sftp.server )
dathinab 6y ago
Scp itself is/will be deprecated. (But not deleted for now) A new command with similar cli but different name is in process but it will not (and can't) support all features of scp so it can't be a drop in replacement and as such you can't name it scp as this would brake existing systems.
- jhenkens 6y ago
  I forsee a new alias in my .bashrc

IIUC the `scp` cmdline will still exist it'll just use the sftp protocol behind the scenes instead of the eco protocol. Note that the deprecation is about the protocol not the cli.

herodoturtle 6y ago

Thanks for clarifying. I felt the same as OP above. The title of this post totally through me off.

klohto 6y ago
Why not just read the article?
- alias_neo 6y ago
  In my, and possibly their defence, I read the article, and missed the one line in the second to last paragraph which states that it is the protocol being replaced. The way the article opens, coupled with the title makes that an easy point to miss.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah it seems like that would be in the first paragraph.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Burying the lede. We are all bad at it, but developers seem to be worse than most. Maybe it’s all the bottom up thinking we do.
    - kstrauser 6y ago
      I've become a big fan of military-style Bottom Line Up Front writing[0]. In this case, the article could have started with "we're deprecating the scp protocol and updating the scp command line utility to use the sftp protocol instead." [0] https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/ https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/
- LeCow 6y ago
  > OP: ask innocent question to clarify the article > You: understand the article better!
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  To confirm if headlines are accurate?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Pretty solid plan generally speaking I think.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

DarkmSparks 6y ago

I doubt this will be accepted. It'll break a lot of valid functionality that relies on it, and the only case I can see presented as to why is for situations when servers choose to offer scp when they should have chosen to offer sftp. Complaining that some people hand out shell access and this creates a "problem" that they gave people access to shell commands verges on ridiculous.

hannob 6y ago
It looks like the openssh main dev is positive about this change: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/pull/194#pullrequestreview-450344807 https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/pull/194#pullreq... That sounds like it will probably be accepted after a few more minor fixes.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
You can deprecate something while still letting people add it back into their PPA manually. If you absolutely need an deprecated tool, no one's going to stop you: it's linux. Heck, just com,pile it from source and be on your merry unsupporteed way.
- monoideism 6y ago
  Yeah, and lose the security updates? I much prefer the status quo. Don't agree that this change is necessary.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    The scp protocol is literally deprecated: what do you not agree with? The idea (and already being worked on) is to change the scp command's underlying code so that it behaves exactly the same as before, all your scripts will keep working just fine, it just won't use the now dead scp protocol under the hood and will instead use the universally supported sftp protocol.
    - monoideism 6y ago

alias_neo 6y ago

Thanks for pointing that out, even after reading the article I had not understood that to be the case. I suspect doing so will have issues of its own however.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
I agree; the headline simply says "deprecating scp" which suggests that the command "scp" would be deprecated :)

lloeki 6y ago

In practice many times I end up using: ssh cat /foo/bar > /bar/baz ssh tar c /foo | tar x -C /bar mostly because variants such as vagrant ssh or docker-machine ssh, cross-product with the remote target being any weird platform like solaris or a limited busybox or has sftp disabled

jcranmer 6y ago
In practice, tar c | ssh tar x can actually be far faster than scp -r, especially when you have a lot of small files.
- sethhochberg 6y ago
  I've found many people either forget (or never knew) that pipes have a buffer, and that buffers are very useful when you are dealing with potentially bursty throughput. In a previous team where we dealt with shipping around lots of ZFS snapshots (where both the performance of reading from disk can vary based on the ARC and filesystem metadata) and occasionally using VPN tunnels on public internet links, pv to get even larger pipe buffers than standard was often a huge performance equalizer. Readers read as fast as they can, writers write as fast as they can, and the buffer massages any variability in the middle. https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv
  - saltcured 6y ago
    It's not just the buffer, it is the PIPE. Specifically, pipelining that streams one file after another, without an idle period of waiting for the round-trip acknowledgements of one file receipt prior to sending the next. Using rsync over ssh has the same massive benefit for transferring many files, even if there is no existing data to make use of its differential transfer mechanisms. (Those extra mechanisms are usually beneficial in WAN scenarios as well, except when you have high speed links, in which case blasting the full files may be faster than doing the IO to figure out comparisons and skip transfer.) Edited: adjusted confused punctuation.
edgyquant 6y ago

StillBored 6y ago

Which probably won't work in a lot of cases. I just got burned by the very minimal raspian ssh server they ship by default. First it didn't support the authentication method I wanted to use, and then it didn't have any port forwarding ability. I'm betting it doesn't have sftp support either.

neop1x 6y ago
Yes, many embedded devices run Dropbear where built-in scp support is often enabled. But most systems probably won't have sftp binary from openssh installed ( https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/nas/sftp.server https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/nas/sftp.server )

dathinab 6y ago

Scp itself is/will be deprecated. (But not deleted for now) A new command with similar cli but different name is in process but it will not (and can't) support all features of scp so it can't be a drop in replacement and as such you can't name it scp as this would brake existing systems.

jhenkens 6y ago
I forsee a new alias in my .bashrc