C-Kermit 11: The First Release of a Legendary Utility in 15 Years

John Gurzen has announced the release of C-Kermit 11 — the first release of this file-transfer utility in fifteen years. For those with a good memory, the event itself sounds almost like a message from the past: there was a time when Kermit remained an indispensable tool for moving files between machines, but most of us haven't thought about it in years — if we ever heard of it at all.

Gurzen, who maintains the Kermit package in Debian, noticed that the program had fallen out of step with modern expectations, and last year he set about preparing patches. He singles out two problem areas.

Security and transfer mode

The first — hardly surprising for a project of such venerable age — is security. The second has to do with the way Kermit handles data by default: historically it performed character-encoding conversion and end-of-line translation. Today such behavior is usually unnecessary — we've grown accustomed to byte-for-byte identical transfer of binary data, and the old defaults caused confusion and, in rare cases, even led to data corruption.

The details of the work done are laid out in the project's list of changes. An amusing detail spotted in the comments: the author labeled the link to the changelog on GitHub with the terse caption “the changelog” — even though his own blog is named exactly the same thing, “The Changelog.” Whether the pun was intentional remains unclear.

For many readers, C-Kermit has long since become a name out of the history books of computing. All the more curious, then, that someone keeps bringing these tools into line with modern realities — fixing not so much bugs as habits that, over the decades, have grown obsolete.

Source: LWN.net