uucp through flow-controlled (XON/XOFF) network

[Dave Martindale]

> Question: Should uucp be able to function over a flow-controlled
> 	network that uses XON/XOFF as flow control.

As others have pointed out, if your network can handle moderate-length
bursts of data without losing it, uucp's own windowing scheme will work.
But sometimes, you HAVE to have flow control between the CPU and the
network - an example is Sytek Localnet, which is arbitrarily slow depending
on how congested the network is right now.

One simple fix (well, kludge) is to add a simple byte-stuffing layer
underneath the packet driver, which takes any XONs, XOFFs, and other
objectionable characters (some I/O packages won't transmit NUL, for
example) and encode them as a unique sequence of two characters
before transmission, performing the reverse transformation at the other
end.  This allows the use of flow control, and slows things down only a
little since only a few bytes get expanded.  More CPU overhead, though.