[Chicken-hackers] Outstanding patches

[Peter Bex]

Hi everyone,

I've been noticing a growing number of patches have gone by without
satisfactory resolution.  To avoid them getting forgotten, I'll repost
them here:

"always use temporary filenames in csc"
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-hackers/2012-11/msg00017.html

This discussion is still ongoing, but I wanted to mention for completeness.


"install-extension fix for when the second arg contains pairs (SOURCE DEST)"
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-hackers/2012-10/msg00049.html

I think this can probably just be applied as-is.  I remember Felix looked
at this at T-DOSE but he said he needed to have a closer look, IIRC.


"Add .gitignore"
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-hackers/2012-10/msg00048.html

I'm unsure.  If it bothers Mario enough, maybe it should just be applied.
I don't really care either way, but I seem to remember Felix mentioned
that it would be annoying if git would hide "too much", and I agree that
would be annoying.  The current behavior is a little annoying too.
Adding local overrides can be done via your own ~/.gitignore


"disallow compiling from both stdin & named files"
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-hackers/2012-10/msg00033.html

Unsure.  Maybe this will get resolved automatically when the temporary
files thread gets resolved.


"'deep-stack' option, declaration and build-mode"
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-hackers/2012-08/msg00002.html

I don't like this much as it doesn't improve the situation "by default".
Asking newbies to recompile Chicken (this patch seems mostly aimed at
newbies and Scheme purists) is overly burdensome.  Maybe we should
just forget about it.


"Buffer overrun vulnerability in Chicken's scheduler"
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2012-06/msg00032.html

I think this REALLY should be resolved, especially since we knew about
this before making the 4.8.0 release.  There's a known workaround and
it doesn't affect Linux (arguably the most popular platform for Chicken
servers) in the default config, but it's still a risk.  On Windows, the
behavior is also a little undefined and may cause a hang when the FD
limit is reached.

Windows is the main reason that we haven't applied it as-is.  Maybe one
of our Windows users can have another look at how to fix this?
The patch works for *nix just fine.  I'm not 100% sure about platforms
like Haiku.  Maybe we should just use poll() on platforms that support it?

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
--
"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer
 is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically
 and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic
 experience much like composing poetry or music."
                                                        -- Donald Knuth