Re: Config & Gnome (Was Re: Working lp5250d...)

Scott Klement wrote:

> On Fri, 5 May 2000, Jason M. Felice wrote:
>
> > It is a bit cumbersome, I think so myself.  I didn't really have a better 
>way to
> > accomplish the goals without either a) introducing a lot of additional 
>maintenance
> > or b) not having access to all the options from the command line or c) not 
>having
> > the system generic enough to be used in the Gnome 5250 emulator as well
> > as the console 5250 emulator.
> >
> > BTW, I've resurrected some code from the first attempt at the Gnome 5250 
>emulator
> > and have gotten it working again, and the config code was a life saver here.
>
> Your points on the "config stuff" are well taken, Jay.  Thank you for
> explaining the situation.  I don't have any better ideas that'd meet all
> of the goals that you list...
>
> So I'll get used to the config options... :)

Hehe.  I didn't mean it quite like that...  but if you *do* think of anything 
better,
I'm
certainly open to it, time permitting...

> > Unless there are any objections, particularly from Mike Madore, I'm
> > going to pull Gnome 5250 into the tn5250 CVS tree so that changes
> > won't get "lost."  If it is still buggy (I cleaned it up a bit last
> > night, have to test better), I'll have it disabled by default.
> >
> > That's one of three pieces of code I'm sitting on.  The second was an
> > `experimental' pure GTK+ interface that never really got off the
> > ground.  If I merge that with the Gnome support, I could have,
> > basically, "Gnome support which still compiles without Gnome."  This
> > is good to resurrect the Windows port.
> >
> > The third piece of code is a contribution both Mike and I received
> > which did a lot of Windows NT portability, and implemented a bunch of
> > features which would allow the 5250 code to be used server-side
> > instead of client-side.  The server-side stuff was written to allow a
> > third-party product (an AS/400 environment?) to serve 5250
> > connections...  I'm not sure how far a jump it will be from the code
> > in this patch to a tn5250d program/environment/API/whatever, but it is
> > a _big_ step in that direction.
>
> Would it be possible to make a new release (and include my recent
> patches) before adding all of these new things into the code?  I'd like
> to help test & troubleshoot this project...  But at this point, tn5250
> is important to me getting work done, I need something to fall back on
> if a change turns out to make the emulator unstable...

The gnome-5250 and gtk-5250 stuff doesn't require any patches to the core
lib5250 (in fact, it hasn't for quite some time).  In other words, if they end 
up
being unstable, you can still just use plain old `tn5250', which won't change.
That's why I don't feel to bad putting that stuff in now.

About the server-side code, tho:  I haven't looked at it, but I suspect we 
should
make a release before that happens, maybe at a forking point (in other words,
release 0.16.0, then 0.17.1 with the server-side code in it).  I'll have a 
better
picture with whether we should go *that* far once I look at the code.

I certainly want to avoid breaking it and running...

(Aside to Mike: Yes, if you could handle merging the server code, I'd love it.)

> The Gnome/GTK+ stuff sounds interesting (especially now that I'm using
> Gnome as my primary desktop on 4 machines)

At this point, it works.  Not all the keys are mapped, and that should be done
according to a key-mapping (perhaps with compiled-in defaults) according to
the config file(s)  I'm fixing up the indicator display right now so that it 
will be
generally useable by the public, but be warned that there really aren't any
features over and above tn5250 right now (unless you count that we actually
have a blinking cursor, blinking display attributes, and support for the
`vertical bar' attribute).

The first features which are good candidates are the features that were plain
ole' impossible with plain tn5250.  The cross-hairs-type feature (what is that
really called?) is one of them.  The ability to handle arbitrary character
mappings, and maybe use unicode representation internally - that's a little
ways down the road.

> I guess I'm a little confused about the whole "tn5250d" concept.  What
> would this be useful for?  If you don't have an AS/400 in the equasion,
> why on earth would you want to run the 5250 protocol?   If you do have
> an AS/400, why wouldn't you use the telnet daemon thats a part of the
> operating system?

There are a few reasons.  One of them is for Mike's project involving a
telnet-to-SNA-passthrough.  Another reason is that when and if I get
back to my RPG compiler, which will use lib5250 for display services, I
could have RPG programs run from a client with a 5250 emulator.  Another
reason is that I have about twenty or so hosts in the field that I manage
over connections which are sometimes *very* slow.  The 5250 protocol
requires less bandwidth... if I could write a utility for doing some simple
management of these boxes via 5250, it would make my job easier.  It
also makes moving Linux into traditional AS/400 shops easier, as it
makes the interface more familiar to AS/400 administrators.  (We have
had some ideas for some Linux appliances which serve fax/remote printing
functions for AS/400s - even printer-to-email gateway would be pretty
useful for some places).

>
> Regards,
> Scott
>

Another thing that I just remembered, we can now do SSL all legal-like.
This would be based on the OpenSSL libraries, which you'd have to install first.

Would this be interesting to people?  I can't say that I have the time to do
it, but I'd like to get a guage for interest anyway.

-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice

+---
| This is the LINUX5250 Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to LINUX5250@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to LINUX5250-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to LINUX5250-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---