Re: Packed Fields bug -- LINUX5250



On Sat, 21 Apr 2001 kolmann@attglobal.net wrote:

> Pardon my ignorance, I am only learning LINUX and still
> have not succussfully installed TN5250, but I have some
> small experience with 5250 data streams and what I do
> is replace characters 'ONLY IN THE DATA USUALLY
> AFTER a SF ORDER' that are less that X'40' (EBCDIC)
> (perhaps the test could be done better)
> with X'1F' (EBCDIC). This prevents the packed fields
> being incorrectly interpreted as control chars.
> If I knew more about C I would try to isolate the code.
> Sorry
> Frank Kolmann
> 

Frank... 

We've already made considerable effort to fix these types of problems,
but you won't be able to take advantage of these fixes if you're running
a version of tn5250 that was released before the changes!

That's why Mike asked what version of tn5250 he's running.  All the 
updates in the world won't help if he's using a version made prior to
the updates!

this is a quote from ChangeLog in the current source distribution:

2000-06-21 Mike Madore <mmadore@turbolinux.com>
- Fixed off by one errors when checking screen position validity.
  Emulator was erroneously sending negative responses when output was to
  the last row of the screen.
- Add more validity checking of orders and commands.  The emualtor now
  produces the same error messages as a real terminal while running Scott
  Klement's test program.

2000-06-20 Mike Madore <mmadore@turbolinux.com>
- Modified the following functions so that they now send a negative 
  response when they encounter illegal parameters:
     start_of_header
     repeat_to_address
     insert_cursor
     and others...
  This fixes a number of the assertions when viewing 'non-printable'
  characters.  There are still several of these cases to code for, so it's
  possible to get assertions if you view binary data.

2000-04-27 Mike Madore <mmadore@turbolinux.com>
- Applied Scott Klement's patches to improve handling of undisplayable
  characters.

To the best of my knowledge at this time, all undisplayable characters
are being treated the same way that they are on a "real IBM Terminal".

However, much of these changes are not available, even in 0.16.1.  
Unless you're running the developement sources newer than 2000-06-21,
you won't be taking advantage of them!

Mike/Jay...  can more of this stuff be merged into the stable source?  
Can we make a newer release for these people?   Can we eradicate all 
the old releases? :)



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