To: tytso@MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Cc: brlewis@MIT.EDU, jweiss@MIT.EDU, mhbraun@MIT.EDU, othomas@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: othomas@MIT.EDU
Subject: re: kermit on Athena 
In-Reply-To: your message of Tue, 02 Aug 1994 19:10:47 -0400.
             <9408022310.AA00920@tsx-11.MIT.EDU> 
Date: Mon, 08 Aug 1994 11:05:30 EDT
From: "oliver thomas" <othomas@MIT.EDU>


This is an update of the kermit/zmodem situation from the consulting end of
things. 

After talking things over, it turns out that recommending kermit as the sole
solution for file transfer may be more of a problem than I had anticipated.
Partly because zmodem has a large and loyal following and is easier to use
(receives are initiated automatically, etc.), and partly because the kermit
client for the Mac, as far as I have seen, is in dismal shape. It's old, does
not support windowing, and has been known to crash reliably on PowerMacs and
Centrises.

There are commercial products on both the Mac and MS-DOS machines which
implement better kermit file transfer, but to have a commercial solution as
the only one available opens a whole other can of worms.

At any rate, perhaps we should allocate some amount of time to at least
isolating the breaking point for zmodem (from what I've seen it looks like the
new telnetd's) and try to figure out how much time/effort it would be to fix.

We're going to recommend the rlogin work-around to people who want to use
zmodem for right now. It seems to be working.

Please send any comments to either me or the group. 

Thanks guys,

-oliver