Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~
A friend of mine once asked me, if I could write a little program for
his BBS that would cancel all the system-requesters that may appear,
as his harddisk brought up read/write errors which were not really
existant.

So this is my first attempt for such a patch. I thought somebody had
already invented a program like this, but none of the asked sysops
could help.
 
The patch will kill any requester that matches a pattern given in a
config file. Other requesters will not be harmed at all.

Requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~
EasyRequestPatch needs Kick 2.04 or higher and about 12 KB of memory.

History
~~~~~~~
V1.3 (01-Oct-95):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- No stack problems anymore. Now uses it's own stack for the patch
  routine.    

V1.2 (25-Aug-95):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Crashed on MC68000 due to one (!) accidentially used 68020
  instructions. Fixed.
- Not enough stack will pop up the requester now.
- Added stack checking. Now it cannot crash anymore due to too few
  stack. Minimum stack required for pattern matching: 1500 bytes.
- Moved the pattern token creation to the config parsing, so the
  patch has become a little big faster.
- The bug with the Ctrl-C key doesn't appear anymore.
 
V1.1 (28-Jul-95):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Since there were problems with read write errors, I've set the
  maximum quantum up again to 10 seconds.
- Fixes some little bugs which caused the requester to be forgotten
  too early.
- The fixes didn't help at all. Seems as if read/write errors lock
  up the dos output routines, so I have added a new linked list
  containing the output strings so they can be printed by the main
  program. This allows me to use buffered string printing again.
  Now it finally *should* run correctly.
- Those little annoying bugs... logical mistake locked the output
  buffer list during output so the requester hung again. Fixed using
  another little buffer. If it now doesn't run, I'll give it up.
 
V1.0 (26-Jul-95):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- The logfile was a little bit faulty due to the mixed usage of
  buffered and non-buffered writing. This has been fixed now.
- Changed the main loop quantum from 1 VBL delay to 10 VBLs. This
  will reduce the cpu usage.
- Changed the requester-timeout to two seconds instead of one.
- Modified the parser to check for more errors.
- Increased the general buffers a bit.
- Strange things seem to happen: The last program opening a
  requester, will get the control-c signal passed through. No clue
  why this happens and how to prevent it. Please use 'ERP Quit'
  instead of the Ctrl-C key.
- Added the wait and reset events.
- Added the beep and hard reset events.

V1.0ß (25-Jul-95):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- First release. Works quite well.

Copyright notice
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EasyRequestPatch (ERP) and it's documentation are Copyright © 1995
by Chris Hodges. All rights reserved.

Contact address
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Any mails or donations to:

Chris Hodges                    Account: 359 68 63
Kennedystr. 8                   BLZ    : 700 530 70
D-82178 Puchheim                Bank   : Sparkasse Fürstenfeldbruck
Germany
Tel.: 089/8005856
Email: chris@sixpack.pfalz.org 

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
[generic]                 2951    4652  63.4% -lh5- 18e3 Oct  1  1995 erp
[generic]                  679    1258  54.0% -lh5- a38d Jul 28  1995 ERP.config
[generic]                 3576    7783  45.9% -lh5- 8d66 Oct  1  1995 ERP13.doc
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         3 files    7206   13693  52.6%            Oct 19  1995