Subj : SBBS/W32 Kermit SABOTAGE
To   : Michel Samson
From : Stephen Hurd
Date : Tue Nov 09 2004 05:19 pm

  Re: SBBS/W32 Kermit SABOTAGE
  By: Michel Samson to Stephen Hurd on Tue Nov 09 2004 17:10:02

 >      To provide instructions regarding SysOp BBS SoftWare was never part
 > of the deal, as far as i'm concerned:  each person, SysOp and BBSer, was
 > supposed to contribute with what he knew best...  In any case, i'll take
 > your word for what it is and see how it goes;  don't miss the next post.

Not sure what the deal was... but I only know of two people with any real
hands-on kermit knoledge... Winston Smith and yourself.  My use of kermit has
always been limited to the occasional file transfer over particulaily weird
links... and I generally use a much slower mode than is really required.

For 8-bit clean links (ie: telnet) I generally do not use Kermit.  Not because
I have anything against Kermit per se, but because I personally find it faster
to use something else.

I do understand that there are at least a couple people who use Kermit on a
regular basis.  For those people, I'm therefore interested in allowing them to
use their protocol of choice.  Kermit will never be the first file transfer
tool I reach for, but I can readily understand that it may the the first one
someone else reaches for.  My interest is therefore to provide a useable Kermit
file transfer to those people who use Kermit because they want to.  Personally,
I would believe that these are the people who would have a sane Kermit
implementation... not people using HyperTerminal for example which has a
terrible Kermit implementation.  If I saw someone using Kermit in
HyperTerminal, I'd reccomend using a different transfer protocol.  If
HyperTerminal is their terminal of choice, it would be silly for them to use
Kermit no matter how good the real Kermit protocol is.  This is the main reason
I have a bit of resistance to providing a 7-bit slow kermit as a choice... on a
telnet connection (which they have) there is no reason to use a 7-bit paranoid
Kermit.

However, I'm even willing to go a step further and provide them with a 7-bit
slow kermit if that's what they want... but I don't want to promote the use of
7-bit slow kermit in the face of protocols which are better than 7-bit slow
kermit for the purpose of transferring a file from a BBS over a telnet
connection.  Ideally, I personally feel the best bet would be to have the
choices something like this:

Kermit [7]-bit (Compatible) - SLOW
XModem - SLOW
XModem/1K - Sluggish
YModem - SLOW
YModem/1K - Sluggish
YModem/G - Good
ZModem - Fast
Kermit (Modern) - Fast

So the new user has a resonable chance of picking the appropriate protocol.
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