1From news@columbia.edu Fri Dec 17 21:05:44 1999 2From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz) 3Subject: Announcing a new GPL'd Kermit program for UNIX 4Date: 18 Dec 1999 01:49:54 GMT 5Organization: Columbia University 6Message-ID: <83ep82$8st$1@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu> 7To: kermit.misc@columbia.edu 8 9 10This to announce a brief testing period for a new, compact, and GPL'd 11Kermit program for UNIX. The new program is called G-Kermit (GNU Kermit). 12It is intended to meet the need for a Kermit protocol implementation 13that is: 14 15 . Stable and low-maintenance 16 . Small and fast with no frills 17 . Released under the GNU Public License 18 19G-Kermit is command-line only (no interactive commands or scripting) and 20remote-mode only (no making connections). It has an extremely simple user 21interface, and implements a large subset of the Kermit protocol in a small 22amount of highly portable code. 23 24It has been built and tested on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, ranging 25from early-1980s-era to up-to-the-minute, using both traditional C and 26ANSI C. It is designed to be as independent as possible of platform- 27specific features, and therefore to be stable for many years if we resist 28the temptation to add features to it. The size of the binary ranges from 2929K (on HP-UX 8.00) to 99K on Ultrix/MIPS, with an average size of 52K 30over 37 builds, and a typical size of 34K on PC-based UNIXes. 31 32It's easy to build, install, and uninstall. It requires no privileges. 33Documentation is included as a plain-text README file and a man page. 34 35You can find G-Kermit 1.00 Beta.01 at: 36 37 ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/test/tar/gkermit.tar.Z (78K) 38 ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/test/tar/gkermit.tar.gz (53K) 39 40Uncompress, untar, read the README file, and take it from there (in most 41cases you just type "make" to build it). 42 43Send test reports to kermit-support@columbia.edu. 44 45- Frank 46 47------------------------------ 48Updates since the first Beta release: 49 50Beta.02 20 Dec 99: 51 . Handle situation in which gkermit was built with MAXRP < DEFRP. 52 . Handle situation in which gkermit was built with MAXRP > 9020. 53 . Don't allocate tinbuf[] if built with USE_GETCHAR. 54 . Fix cmdlin() to return start state. 55 . Updates & fixes to README incl notes about HP-UX 6.5. 56 . Don't show bogus packet in debug log if user interrupted with ^C... 57 . Use EAGAIN instead of EWOULDBLOCK on SVR3 and earlier. 58 . Fixed interruption vs streaming (but the fix was in C-Kermit). 59 60Beta.03 21 Dec 99: 61 . <srfil>F was not encoding the filename before sending it back in the ACK. 62 . Avoid creating files with multiple backup prefixes. 63 . Change clean target in makefile to not use wildcards (for HP-UX 6 and 7). 64 . Add missing option -w to usage message. 65 . Fixed assorted typos and errors in README. 66 . Changed crc routine to guard better against sign extension. 67 . Catch transmission errors when receiving and streaming. 68 . Added -x switch to let user force Xon/Xoff if not built with SETXONXOFF. 69 . Removed ttflui() call from streamon() - it wrecked multifile transfers. 70 71Beta.04 22 Dec 99: 72 . Changed non-ANSI VOID def from nothing to int. 73 . Added -DNOXONXOFF to override automatic setting of Xon/Xoff on HPUX. 74 . In decode(), got rid of zputc() -- just call putc() inline. 75 . More debugging. 76 77Beta.05 23 Dec 99: 78 . Add zchko() and call it from rcvfil(). 79 . Change zrtol() and zbackup() to return success/failure codes; this prevents 80 gkermit from overwriting original file if zbackup fails, e.g. on 81 NFS-mounted DOS file system. 82 83Beta.06 23 Dec 99: 84 . Sleep a sec after erroring out & before exiting to allow any/some/more 85 incoming packets to be absorbed by ttflui() in doexit(). 86 . Improved the E-packet messages. 87 . Added stty target to makefile. 88 . Added support for 2.11BSD (16-bit. 64K address space) and bsd211 target. 89 90Beta.07 24 Dec 99: 91 . Allowed for SIG_I and SIG_V definition on CC command line. 92 . Added --x to override automatic setting of Xon/Xoff. 93 . gkermit -d now runs ttopen and ttpkt to record settings in debug log. 94 . Fixed recording of GKERMIT options in debug log. 95 . Allowed gkermit to receive NULs unprefixed. 96 . Allowed -d to take an optional filename arg. 97 . Fixed backup file creation to avoid duplicate backup suffixes. 98 99Beta.08 25 Dec 99: 100 . Fixed zbackup() to not create filenames longer than MAXPATHLEN. 101 . Fixed reception of files containing NUL bytes. 102 . Final cleanup with "gcc -Wall". 103 104Release 1.00 25 Dec 99. 105------------------------------ 106