ftp notes

[Greg Hackney]

FYI
We hired someone to configure the networking on our Pyramid,
and he left this memo. This is relating to OSx4.1.
--
Greg

> I have found what I think is the problem with the FTP user agent not
> understanding the "binary" command.  It turns out that the code is
> _heavily_ dependent on the stack for argument passing - it uses a
> dummy first argument as a pointer to the rest of the arguments in
> variable-argument functions.  This code breaks on the Pyramid.
> Pyramid apparently fixed the bug in a function "command", but there is
> another function, "call", which does the same thing, which they didn't
> fix.  As a result, things break when the commands "binary", "tenex",
> etc are run, yet we can still run them via "type binary", "type
> tenex", etc.  I suspect that there are other bugs in other BSD and
> AT&T programs stemming from this stupidity in programming style (it's
> like they don't know varargs exists!).