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
------------------------------
