franco@iuvax.UUCP (05/04/87)
The version of xmdm that was posted to comp.binaries.atari.st is actually
an "improved" version of 1.5. The improvements were done by Bloomington
ST users to make it more suitable to us. In particular we have added the
following:
1. The use of the file selector (fsel_inp) to locate, send, move and
remove files.
2. A talk mode which makes "cross-town" file transfers easier (a line
indicating filename, size and xmit time preceeds the transmission
and the screen is split - the top half of the screeen contains text
from a remote machine, the bottom half contains user text)
3. Half Duplex
4. Lots of minor improvements like displaying the terminal screen when
requesting a receive file name, create, remove directories, move,
remove files etc.
I would imagine that 1.8 is different from 1.5 in the following ways:
1. More protocols are supported.
2. packet sizes are adjustable
It probably makes sense to merge the two sources to get a "super-xmdm"
program. I would have done that myself prior to sending xmdm to comp.bin...
but I did not know (or recall) that Bammi was going to make improvements
(I believe he told me the xmdm project was dead in favor of a zmdm package
he was developing). BTW xmdm is interesting to some of us because it is
small and does everything we want it to do. We don't need all kinds of
terminal emulation - we have discovered that the key to efficient terminal
behavior is a good TERMCAP so for us one terminal emulator is fine (we
don't need the graphics emulation - yet). We don't need all kinds of
settings, either (except for baud and duplex). We like xmdm because it is
reasonably reliable and forgiving (e.g. you can type a:filename or
a:\filename). However, our additions were a series of hacks so they are
not very pretty to look at.
franco@iucs.cs.indiana.edu