From news@columbia.edu Fri Dec 17 21:05:44 1999 From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz) Subject: Announcing a new GPL'd Kermit program for UNIX Date: 18 Dec 1999 01:49:54 GMT Organization: Columbia University Message-ID: <83ep82$8st$1@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu> To: kermit.misc@columbia.edu This to announce a brief testing period for a new, compact, and GPL'd Kermit program for UNIX. The new program is called G-Kermit (GNU Kermit). It is intended to meet the need for a Kermit protocol implementation that is: . Stable and low-maintenance . Small and fast with no frills . Released under the GNU Public License G-Kermit is command-line only (no interactive commands or scripting) and remote-mode only (no making connections). It has an extremely simple user interface, and implements a large subset of the Kermit protocol in a small amount of highly portable code. It has been built and tested on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, ranging from early-1980s-era to up-to-the-minute, using both traditional C and ANSI C. It is designed to be as independent as possible of platform- specific features, and therefore to be stable for many years if we resist the temptation to add features to it. The size of the binary ranges from 29K (on HP-UX 8.00) to 99K on Ultrix/MIPS, with an average size of 52K over 37 builds, and a typical size of 34K on PC-based UNIXes. It's easy to build, install, and uninstall. It requires no privileges. Documentation is included as a plain-text README file and a man page. You can find G-Kermit 1.00 Beta.01 at: ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/test/tar/gkermit.tar.Z (78K) ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/test/tar/gkermit.tar.gz (53K) Uncompress, untar, read the README file, and take it from there (in most cases you just type "make" to build it). Send test reports to kermit-support@columbia.edu. - Frank ------------------------------ Updates since the first Beta release: Beta.02 20 Dec 99: . Handle situation in which gkermit was built with MAXRP < DEFRP. . Handle situation in which gkermit was built with MAXRP > 9020. . Don't allocate tinbuf[] if built with USE_GETCHAR. . Fix cmdlin() to return start state. . Updates & fixes to README incl notes about HP-UX 6.5. . Don't show bogus packet in debug log if user interrupted with ^C... . Use EAGAIN instead of EWOULDBLOCK on SVR3 and earlier. . Fixed interruption vs streaming (but the fix was in C-Kermit). Beta.03 21 Dec 99: . <srfil>F was not encoding the filename before sending it back in the ACK. . Avoid creating files with multiple backup prefixes. . Change clean target in makefile to not use wildcards (for HP-UX 6 and 7). . Add missing option -w to usage message. . Fixed assorted typos and errors in README. . Changed crc routine to guard better against sign extension. . Catch transmission errors when receiving and streaming. . Added -x switch to let user force Xon/Xoff if not built with SETXONXOFF. . Removed ttflui() call from streamon() - it wrecked multifile transfers. Beta.04 22 Dec 99: . Changed non-ANSI VOID def from nothing to int. . Added -DNOXONXOFF to override automatic setting of Xon/Xoff on HPUX. . In decode(), got rid of zputc() -- just call putc() inline. . More debugging. Beta.05 23 Dec 99: . Add zchko() and call it from rcvfil(). . Change zrtol() and zbackup() to return success/failure codes; this prevents gkermit from overwriting original file if zbackup fails, e.g. on NFS-mounted DOS file system. Beta.06 23 Dec 99: . Sleep a sec after erroring out & before exiting to allow any/some/more incoming packets to be absorbed by ttflui() in doexit(). . Improved the E-packet messages. . Added stty target to makefile. . Added support for 2.11BSD (16-bit. 64K address space) and bsd211 target. Beta.07 24 Dec 99: . Allowed for SIG_I and SIG_V definition on CC command line. . Added --x to override automatic setting of Xon/Xoff. . gkermit -d now runs ttopen and ttpkt to record settings in debug log. . Fixed recording of GKERMIT options in debug log. . Allowed gkermit to receive NULs unprefixed. . Allowed -d to take an optional filename arg. . Fixed backup file creation to avoid duplicate backup suffixes. Beta.08 25 Dec 99: . Fixed zbackup() to not create filenames longer than MAXPATHLEN. . Fixed reception of files containing NUL bytes. . Final cleanup with "gcc -Wall". Release 1.00 25 Dec 99. ------------------------------ Article: 10842 of comp.protocols.kermit.misc From: fdc@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.kermit.misc Subject: Announcing G-Kermit 1.00 Date: 27 Dec 1999 21:19:05 GMT Organization: Columbia University G-Kermit 1.00 is released. The web page is: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/gkermit.html For those who missed the Beta test, G-Kermit is small, fast, and portable Kermit protocol implementation for UNIX released under the GPL. Prebuilt binaries are available for over 40 hardware/OS/version combinations: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/gkermit.html#down If you can send in binaries that are not listed, please let me know. After allowing a few days for more binaries to come in, we'll make a wider announcement. - Frank ------------------------------
