Subj : synchronet needs a rewrit
To   : Digital Man
From : Kevinl
Date : Sun May 05 2019 10:56 am

-=> Digital Man wrote to tidux <=-

 DM>   Re: synchronet needs a rewrite
 DM>   By: tidux to All on Tue Apr 30 2019 08:22 pm

 DM> Synchronet currently uses Cryptlib v3.4.4 which was the latest and
 DM> greatest version up until just last month when v3.4.5 was released and
 DM> of course we'll be upgrading to that version.

Was interested hearing that cryptlib is updated.  I just tried 3.4.5
out in Qodem, and still get the no compatible cipher available error
when talking to modern OpenSSH server with a cryptlib client.  On the
host mode (server) side, it worked OK (I think) without the '-m
hmac-md5' workaround for OpenSSH client to speak to cryptlib server.

Alas, it remains in plan (someday when I get time) for Qodem to switch
to mbedtls + libssh2 for Windows SSH support, which will also mean
losing ssh server for host mode.  cryptlib is just so ... ugh.

 > Finally,
 > the number of
 > systems that understand cp437 natively is plummeting, and so the UI should
 > probably offer a
 > UTF-8 option.

 DM> The number of BBS terminals that understand UTF-8 is incredibly low
 DM> (like maybe, one or two). Anyway, I'm sure we'll get to it some day and
 DM> I don't anticipate it requiring "a rewrite".

I gave g00r00 a CP437-to-UTF8 conversion for Mystic (Pascal), don't
know if it made any users happier or not.  But yeah it's a small
change, certainly not a "rewrite".

What users want in BBS terminals is SyncTERM/NetRunner: CP437 (with a
good font out of the box), ANSI-BBS, file transfers, scrollback, and
good support for OSX and Windows.  But what users want in xterm-type
terminals is vastly different: UTF-8, CJK (including font fallback),
emojis, wide-char, GPU acceleration, tabbed terminals, background
transparency, ncurses/terminfo-level support for "xterm", 24-bit RGB
colors, mouse cut/copy/paste, and X10 mouse support.  I feel that
these two user groups will never converge on a common terminal.  It
has been a bit bizarre seeing these two worlds with such
outwardly-seemingly identical-looking interfaces, yet being so utterly
different in how they are used in practice.

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