LogContext is now the owner of the logevent() function that back ends
and so forth are constantly calling. Previously, logevent was owned by
the Frontend, which would store the message into its list for the GUI
Event Log dialog (or print it to standard error, or whatever) and then
pass it _back_ to LogContext to write to the currently open log file.
Now it's the other way round: LogContext gets the message from the
back end first, writes it to its log file if it feels so inclined, and
communicates it back to the front end.
This means that lots of parts of the back end system no longer need to
have a pointer to a full-on Frontend; the only thing they needed it
for was logging, so now they just have a LogContext (which many of
them had to have anyway, e.g. for logging SSH packets or session
traffic).
LogContext itself also doesn't get a full Frontend pointer any more:
it now talks back to the front end via a little vtable of its own
called LogPolicy, which contains the method that passes Event Log
entries through, the old askappend() function that decides whether to
truncate a pre-existing log file, and an emergency function for
printing an especially prominent message if the log file can't be
created. One minor nice effect of this is that console and GUI apps
can implement that last function subtly differently, so that Unix
console apps can write it with a plain \n instead of the \r\n
(harmless but inelegant) that the old centralised implementation
generated.
One other consequence of this is that the LogContext has to be
provided to backend_init() so that it's available to backends from the
instant of creation, rather than being provided via a separate API
call a couple of function calls later, because backends have typically
started doing things that need logging (like making network
connections) before the call to backend_provide_logctx. Fortunately,
there's no case in the whole code base where we don't already have
logctx by the time we make a backend (so I don't actually remember why
I ever delayed providing one). So that shortens the backend API by one
function, which is always nice.
While I'm tidying up, I've also moved the printf-style logeventf() and
the handy logevent_and_free() into logging.c, instead of having copies
of them scattered around other places. This has also let me remove
some stub functions from a couple of outlying applications like
Pageant. Finally, I've removed the pointless "_tag" at the end of
LogContext's official struct name.
I don't actually know why this was ever here; it appeared in the very
first commit that invented Plug in the first place (7b0e08270) without
explanation. Perhaps Dave's original idea was that sometimes you'd
need those macros _not_ to be defined so that the same names could be
reused as the methods for a particular Plug instance? But I don't
think that ever actually happened, and the code base builds just fine
with those macros defined unconditionally just like all the other sets
of method macros we now have, so let's get rid of this piece of cruft
that was apparently unnecessary all along.
All the main backend structures - Ssh, Telnet, Pty, Serial etc - now
describe structure types themselves rather than pointers to them. The
same goes for the codebase-wide trait types Socket and Plug, and the
supporting types SockAddr and Pinger.
All those things that were typedefed as pointers are older types; the
newer ones have the explicit * at the point of use, because that's
what I now seem to be preferring. But whichever one of those is
better, inconsistently using a mixture of the two styles is worse, so
let's make everything consistent.
A few types are still implicitly pointers, such as Bignum and some of
the GSSAPI types; generally this is either because they have to be
void *, or because they're typedefed differently on different
platforms and aren't always pointers at all. Can't be helped. But I've
got rid of the main ones, at least.
This is another major source of unexplained 'void *' parameters
throughout the code.
In particular, the currently unused testback.c actually gave the wrong
pointer type to its internal store of the frontend handle - it cast
the input void * to a Terminal *, from which it got implicitly cast
back again when calling from_backend, and nobody noticed. Now it uses
the right type internally as well as externally.
Similarly to commit 1c4f12252, this was one of those errors that C
can't catch because of the const-removing prototype of memchr. But
when you memchr() a const string, the value you get back is
_semantically_ a pointer to const, and should be assigned into a
variable of that type.
It has three settings: on, off, and 'only until session starts'. The
idea of the last one is that if you use something like 'ssh -v' as
your proxy command, you probably wanted to see the initial SSH
connection-setup messages while you were waiting to see if the
connection would be set up successfully at all, but probably _didn't_
want a slew of diagnostics from rekeys disrupting your terminal in
mid-emacs once the session had got properly under way.
Default is off, to avoid startling people used to the old behaviour. I
wonder if I should have set it more aggressively, though.
On both Unix and Windows, we now redirect the local proxy command's
standard error into a third pipe; data received from that pipe is
broken up at newlines and logged in the Event Log. So if the proxy
command emits any error messages in the course of failing to connect
to something, you now have a fighting chance of finding out what went
wrong.
This feature is disabled in command-line tools like PSFTP and Plink,
on the basis that in that situation it seems more likely that the user
would expect standard-error output to go to the ordinary standard
error in the ordinary way. Only GUI PuTTY catches it and logs it like
this, because it either doesn't have a standard error at all (on
Windows) or is likely to be pointing it at some completely unhelpful
session log file (under X).
I've defined a new value for the 'int type' parameter passed to
plug_log(), which proxy sockets will use to pass their backend
information on how the setup of their proxied connections are going.
I've implemented support for the new type code in all _nontrivial_
plug log functions (which, conveniently, are precisely the ones I just
refactored into backend_socket_log); the ones which just throw all
their log data away anyway will do that to the new code as well.
We use the new type code to log the DNS lookup and connection setup
for connecting to a networked proxy, and also to log the exact command
string sent down Telnet proxy connections (so the user can easily
debug mistakes in the configured format string) and the exact command
executed when spawning a local proxy process. (The latter was already
supported on Windows by a bodgy logging call taking advantage of
Windows in particular having no front end pointer; I've converted that
into a sensible use of the new plug_log facility, and done the same
thing on Unix.)
I'm about to want to make a change to all those functions at once, and
since they're almost identical, it seemed easiest to pull them out
into a common helper. The new source file be_misc.c is intended to
contain helper code common to all network back ends (crypto and
non-crypto, in particular), and initially it contains a
backend_socket_log() function which is the common part of ssh_log(),
telnet_log(), rlogin_log() etc.
