Re: flexfax: How stable is Hylafax 4.1 beta2 ?

["Mr. Arlington Hewes" <tpcadmin@info.tpc.int>]

>>>>> On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, "PvdV" == Paul van der Vlis wrote:

  PvdV> Hello!

  PvdV> I installed Hylafax 4.1 beta2 because it is shipped with Suse Linux
  PvdV> 6.3.  First I wondered about the name "beta2", but some really good
  PvdV> software will always stay "beta" and will never become "perfect" ;-)


Beta2 is solid on linux. It's head and shoulders above your only other choice, 
which is 4.0pl2. pl2 is also pretty solid, but it's very hard to get it to 
compile on a modern linux platform. There are also a few bugs which you would 
be much better off without (tagline encoding error, y2k problems etc).


  PvdV> I want to use Hylafax in a very serious organisation (a notary office).


Quite right. HylaFAX is a natural choice. My HylaFAX deployment sends over 
20,000 pages daily from about 50 different servers deployed worldwide running 
on a wide variety of UNIX flavours. 


  PvdV> Dmitry Bely told me about RTN problems with Hylafax
  PvdV> and some fax- machines (Canon e.g.) what will make
  PvdV> Hylafax send the page over and over again.  He wrote a
  PvdV> patch for this problem, but I do not find this patch at
  PvdV> http://www.hylafax.org/patches/. After some searching I found it in the
  PvdV> mailing archive: http://www.hylafax.org/archive/2000-03/msg00110.html.

This is correct. Dmitry's (and Harald Pollack's) efforts have been nothing
short of heroic. We're discussing the RTN behaviour on the hylafax-devel list 
now.

  PvdV> How serious is this problem ? How stable is Hylafax 4.1 beta2 ? Is it
  PvdV> maybe better to use Hylafax 4.0 ? Is there a new binary planned with
  PvdV> Dmitry Bely's patch ?

beta-3 will address the RTN issue, yes. It's a long-standing problem with 
HylaFAX when using some combinations of Faxmodem and FAX machines. Dmitry 
appears to have uncovered a FAX protocol violation which leads to the 
condition, whereas it was previously thought to be simply poor line quality, 
and we're overjoyed that the RTN issue may soon be old news.

However, in addressing the RTN bug we must tread very carefully indeed. As i 
said, discussions are ongoing.

  PvdV> Sorry for all these questions ;-)

Not a problem. Presently there is not an official approved version of the 
patch that we can recommend, hence it has not been posted to the WWW site. 
Scary monsters lurk at the level of changes that are being considered!

-Darren