chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuqles) (09/21/84)
Here are two minor changes to inews. One is a small efficiency hack, one
fixes a problem with a potential buffer overrun and coredumps.
Efficiency hack:
While inews is processing a message it keeps a variable called chcount
of the number of characters in the message. The only use of this
variable is to see if the article is too short (too short is
arbitrarily set to 5 characters) and if so inews won't post it.
With the advent of the new postnews and the 'Replace this line with
your message' line and .signature files messages this arbitrarily short
become very rare. Besides, I can't see any real justification for 5
characters over 4 or 6. Since this is the only use for that variable
I just ripped it and the references out completely. People who REALLY
want inews to dump short messages should use the associated line
counter variable instead and dump out messages shorter than some number
of lines since that variable is counted anyway and used elsewhere at
all.
------- inews.c -------
591d590
< long chcount = 0;
641,642d639
< if (isprint(c))
< chcount++;
679,682d675
< if (chcount < 5 && mode <= UNPROC && !is_ctl) {
< fprintf(stderr,"Body of article too short, not posted\n");
< xxit(1);
< }
This is a more serious problem. As I was bringing up 2.10.2 I found that
inews was disappearing into thin air leaving locks and not finishing its
job. Tracking it down with dbx (which is how I found the above as well--
when dbx is single stepping unneccessary loops and things become painfully
obvious) it turns out that the routine genversion() was overflowing a small
buffer. Genversion() creates the version string that is sent out in every
message header. In my case I am keeping both the original version number
from Rick and my own version number so I have a reference to where it
started and what I've done with it. This overflows the measley 32 byte
buffer (I actually think that many of the version strings created overflow
the 32 byte buffer, but mine is long enough to overflow into something
critical). By increasing the buffer size things work again.
------- header.c -------
435c435
< static char retbuf[32];
---
> static char retbuf[BUFLEN];
--
From the spotlight of the center ring: Chuqles Von Rospach
{amd,decwrl,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA
Never force anyone to do anything for you 'in the
name of love.' Love is not to be bargained for.