Re: git: 24e1824e4646 - main - Deprecate telnet daemon

From: Warner Losh <imp_at_bsdimp.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2022 04:37:54 UTC
On Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 10:35 PM Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert@cschubert.com>
wrote:

> In message <FE029833-BB8D-4831-A707-891AD0DB518E@karels.net>, Mike Karels
> write
> s:
> > On 22 Sep 2022, at 7:14, Gregory Byshenk wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 04:42:32PM -0500, Mike Karels wrote:
> > >
> > >> Ditto on the finger memory.  And I tried this:
> > >>
> > >> mike@backup$ nc mail 25
> > >> 220 mail.karels.net Service ready
> > >> helo backup.karels.net
> > >> 500 Command missing Carriage Return
> > >>
> > >> telnet also accepts a service name instead of a port number (part of
> t=
> > he
> > >> finger memory).
> > >
> > > I understand the finger memory. Sometimes at $job I still type
> > > 'telnet' on machines that I know do not have a telnet client.
> > >
> > > But a 'nc -t <hostname> <port>' should solve the problem you
> > > show above. It does for me, in any case.
> >
> > It does not; the result is the same.  The man page does not
> > say anything about newline handling with -t; not sure what
> > it is supposed to do.
> >
> > I also note that nc doesn=E2=80=99t pass control characters like
> > ^D and ^C.
> >
> > Responding to an earlier message: telnet should remain in
> > base, not moved to a port.
>
> Another idea that just occurred to me while reviewing some code is, should
> we adopt the NetBSD telnet (and optionally telnetd)? Telnet is not the
> most
> interesting software to work on and is easily forgotten, not to mention
> we're all busy working on other more useful projects. NetBSD somewhat more
> active maintenance of telnet/telnetd would free up FreeBSD resources. I've
> been toying with the idea of possibly net/netbsd-telnet and
> net/netbsd-telnetd ports. But if we feel replacing FreeBSD telnet/telnetd
> with NetBSD versions might free up some resources, it's worth pondering
> and
> discussing replacing what we have in src with the NetBSD versions.
>
> Though our contrib/telnet was a vendor import at some point. Where did we
> get it from? Does that upstream still exist?
>
> Seems logical to me that for software in its twilight years we may be
> better off collaborating with other BSDs to reduce effort needed to
> maintain such software.
>
> Just throwing it out there for people to think about this weekend.
>

The usual question is 'is it a drop in replacement'? and are there FreeBSD
specific
features of telnet that we'd lose... I'm guessing the answer would be 'yes'
and 'no'
respectively...

Warner