Comment by paulddraper
10 days ago
There's no UNIX requirement for telnet.
Ubuntu does not include it by default (starting 16.04?). Most most distros don't.
10 days ago
There's no UNIX requirement for telnet.
Ubuntu does not include it by default (starting 16.04?). Most most distros don't.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Apple still includes uucp for some unknown reason.
The saving disk space argument makes no sense because telnet was one of the smaller binaries in /usr/bin.
Telnet continues to be widely used for select use cases and being told we're naughty by not including it feels punitive and just adds extra steps. What are you supposed to do, trash a $1m piece of industrial equipment because Apple wants to remind you Telnet is insecure?
New devices are still being released with Telnet where SSH is impractical or unnecessary.
There are many things I want to say in reply to this. So I’ll bullet point them:
* yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
* there are a million telnet clients out in the world. And ones far better than the default OS one. Apple not shipping one standard is not the end of the world or really anything more than a mild inconvenience for the small handful of people who need actual “Telnet” as opposed to Netcat or socat, both of which are far better than base Telnet.
> yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
No, you already own this capital equipment. It's the laptops running macOS that are ephemeral and disposable.
I don't care for excuses or workarounds; why did they do it?
It was an explicit decision whilst leaving a lot more—arguably more useless—garbage in.
Every OS that removed telnet did so for a symbolic reason, not because it was helpful technically.
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You can have it, it’s not on the base install.
99% of Mac users never use it, directly or indirectly. Asking that they have it anyway is a self centric view.
You can still have Telnet!!!
It just isn’t installed by default when 99% of users have no desire for it.
Ubuntu and derivates removing telnet from the default install, along with other basic tools like traceroute etc, was one of the driving factors toward me creating my own distro. I'm sick of basic stuff being omitted because somebody just decided it's not needed anymore.
How on god’s green earth is `sudo apt install telnet` sufficiently challenging to be a driving factor to creating your own distro??
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Netcat works as a telnet client. GAWK can do that too with a dumb loop. So can con(1) under 9front.
Using netcat results in showing Unicode replacement symbols, instead of answering to telnet options. I doubt it implements telnet at all, because this is just not its job.
I agree in principle, but actually, according to the netcat website [0]:
> If netcat is compiled with -DTELNET, the -t argument enables it to respond to telnet option negotiation [always in the negative, i.e. DONT or WONT]. This allows it to connect to a telnetd and get past the initial negotiation far enough to get a login prompt from the server. Since this feature has the potential to modify the data stream, it is not enabled by default. You have to understand why you might need this and turn on the #define yourself.
[0]: https://nc110.sourceforge.io/
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