[Setup-tool-hackers] Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Bastien,

On Thu, 2003-02-27 at 14:14, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > 	It's very hard to compare a system that exists, and works
> > with one that does not.
> 
> I've also got my very own thingo to do simple IPC, that I use in totem:
> $ cat bacon-message-connection.[ch] | wc -l
>     271
> 
> And that replaces the whole of CORBA for simple IPC purposes.

	Well yes it's small. The facts that again it's a type-unsafe, "send
string" API, with no way of ascertaining what the interfaces are, are
rather unfavourable.

	There are also the following bugs/mis-features I saw with a brief
glance, correct me if I'm wrong:

	* missing syscall error handling
	* blocking accept
	* not handling EINTR
	* assuming non-blocking / short reads [ possibly in-spec, 
	  perhaps better to use NON_BLOCK ].
	* blocking connection write
	* no error checking / short write handling on write
	* server_cb locks in a tight loop on 'read' error
	* looks like it creates an insecure, world writable /tmp
	  Unix domain socket -> instant, huge security hazard
	* doesn't do collision checking => instant DOS attack.

> > 	I'd point you at the code in eg. gnome-terminal/terminal.c that does
> > the uniqueness stuff - it's a handful of lines, but of course - if you
> > want to detect errors, do activation etc. you get to write more lines of
> > code. Either way it's a fraction of the code.
> 
> 110 lines, command-line parsing and relative->full path helper included
> in Totem so far.

	Including several security bugs, the inability to handle signals etc.
etc.

	None of that is particularly hard to fix: the message is simple however
- re-use code, preferably that tested over a long period.

> > 	Of course - we should have bonobo-activation tracking all apps, and
> > make that a standard feature of GnomeProgram. But of course, that would
> > be obstructed as soon as it's suggested - too similar to D/BUS.
> 
> That's certainly a better idea than making Gnome apps use bonobo-conf
> instead of GConf.

	As Havoc said the other day - GConf was not designed to store data;
bonobo-conf however - was. Thus - though it took a long time for the
truth to come out - in fact bonobo-conf was a very useful tool, (quite
apart from being able to handle structured data) - you could store data
in a controlled way.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks@gnu.org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot

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