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1992-03-03
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Path: altitude!matrox!uvm-gen!uvm-gen!uunet!kddlab!cs.titech!wnoc-tyo-news!sh.wide!astemgw!icspub!chorus.mei!panasonic.com!mips!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!noose.ecn.purdue.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!zazen!decwrl!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!uop!csusac!ucdavis!toadflax.cs
From: swalton@solaria.csun.edu (Stephen Walton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce
Subject: XPR Kermit 1.111 available for ftp
Message-ID: <11298@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 29 Feb 92 21:21:11 GMT
Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: swalton@solaria.csun.edu (Stephen Walton)
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.datacomm
Lines: 67
Approved: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu
I have released version 1.111 of my XPR Kermit library to the world.
At present, it is available for anonymous FTP from ab20.larc.nasa.gov
as file xprkermit-1.111.lzh in the /amiga/datacomm directory. Please
feel free to FTP it from ab20 and repost it wherever you please,
including FTP sites in Europe, Asia, and Australia, the commercial
services, and your local BBS's.
For the new to the net, a brief introduction: Kermit is a file
transfer protocol (yes, named for the frog) invented at Columbia
University in the late 1970's. Its advantages over the other
protocols currently in use are many, including: the ability to
transfer binary files over 7-bit-wide data paths with or without
parity; better handling of poor quality lines (in my experience); the
fact that packets contain no control characters other than the
start-of-packet and end-of-packet markers, easing transmission over
various networks; support of flow control as a natural part of the
protocol (since control-S and control-Q will never be part of a
packet); and three types of transmission integrity checking (block
checks) which have different tradeoffs between speed and reliability.
XPR Kermit is an implementation of the Kermit protocol as described
above in the form of an eXternal PRotocol (XPR) library. This means
that, once one copies the file xprkermit.library to one's LIBS:
directory, that all communication programs which support external
protocols have automatic access to the features of XPR Kermit. A
partial list of such programs is: VLT (freeware), NComm, JRcomm, Term
1.9, and Handshake (shareware), and A-Talk III (commercial). The
advantage of this scheme is that you need not upgrade your terminal
program to upgrade the file transfer protocols it uses! Also, because
XPR's are implemented as Amiga shared libraries, multiple copies of
terminal programs can share the same copy of the protocol code,
reducing the amount of memory needed for simultaneous transfers.
In version 1.111, I have fixed several bugs in XPR Kermit 1.5, the
previous release, and added a few new features. The biggest new feature
is that the library is now re-entrant, meaning that multiple XPR
Kermit transfers can happen at the same time. The biggest bug fixed
was a buffer overflow problem that often prevented XPR Kermit V1.5 from
working at all on A3000 class machines.
Thanks at this point go to my beta testers, especially Willy Langeveld
and Marvin Weinstein of SLAC, Torkel Lodberg (author of NComm) and Bob
Laughlin.
Version 1.111 of XPR Kermit is not the same as the beta version of C
Kermit recently announced on comp.sys.amiga.datacomm. I am the
co-author of XPR Kermit, and Amiga maintainer of both it and C Kermit,
but the codes are presently separate. (Amiga C Kermit is a standalone
executable program.) Now that Amiga C Kermit is in beta in a stable
form, I am looking at the possibility of turning the C Kermit code
into the next version of XPR Kermit. This would be a *major* upgrade
in XPR Kermit capabilities, including: attribute packets, which tell
the receiver what the file date/time/size/access mode/record
length/record format/etc. of the received file is; extra long packets,
up to 9000 bytes; and sliding windows, an extension to Kermit which
allows continuous sending of packets, thus using 100% of the available
bandwidth. However, these new features come at a fairly high price in
terms of code size and complexity, and may not be suitable for an XPR
library.
-----------
Stephen Walton, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, Cal State Univ. Northridge
srw@csun.edu or swalton@solar.stanford.edu
--
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