A user wrote in to point out the one in winhandl.c, and out of sheer
curiosity, I grepped the whole source base for '([a-zA-Z])\1\1' to see
if there were any others. Of course there are a lot of perfectly
sensible ones, like 'www' or 'Grrr', not to mention any amount of
0xFFFF and the iiii/bbbb emphasis system in Halibut code paragraphs,
but I did spot one more in the recently added udp.but section on
traits, and another in a variable name in uxagentsock.c.
A user mentioned having found this confusing recently, and fair
enough, because it's done in a way that doesn't quite match the
built-in OO system of any language I know about. But after the
rewriting in recent years, I think pretty much everything in PuTTY
that has a system of interchangeable implementations of the same
abstract type is now done basically the same way, so this seems like a
good moment to document the idiom we use and explain all its ins and
outs.
It referred to the global variable 'flags' as an example. But 'flags'
was retired (and good riddance) nearly a year ago, in commit
4ea811a0bf. So we should be using a different example now!
Of course this wouldn't have prevented me from making that mistake
myself - it's not as if I carefully re-read the design principles
appendix before writing each code change! - but it might help explain
to _someone_ at some point...
It claimed they were only found in ssh.c, which is no longer true:
after I broke up ssh.c into smaller pieces, they're now found all over
the place.
Also, one of the things I did during that refactoring was to arrange
that each protocol layer's cleanup function (hopefully) reliably frees
everything the coroutine might have allocated and been in the middle
of using, which was something I knew the old code was quite bad at. So
I've mentioned that in the coroutines section too, while I'm here.
I've recently started using several C99 features in PuTTY, after
finally reaching the point where it didn't break my builds to do so,
even on Windows. So it's now outright inaccurate for the documented
design principles to claim that we're sticking to C90.
While I'm here, I've filled in a bit more detail about the assumptions
we do permit.
After a conversation this week with a user who tried to use it, it's
clear that Borland C can't build the up-to-date PuTTY without having
to make too many compromises of functionality (unsupported API
details, no 'long long' type), even above the issues that could be
worked round with extra porting ifdefs.
The validation end of XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 needs to check that two
time_t values differ by at most XDM_MAXSKEW, which it was doing by
subtracting them and passing the result to abs(). This provoked a
warning from OS X's clang, on the reasonable enough basis that the
value passed to abs was unsigned.
Fixed by using the (well defined) unsigned arithmetic wraparound: to
check that the mathematical difference of two unsigned numbers is in
the interval [-k,+k], compute their difference _plus k_ as an
unsigned, and check the result is in the interval [0,2k] by doing an
unsigned comparison against 2k.
I've shifted away from using the SVN revision number as a monotonic
version identifier (replacing it in the Windows version resource with
a count of days since an arbitrary epoch), and I've removed all uses
of SVN keyword expansion (replacing them with version information
written out by Buildscr).
While I'm at it, I've done a major rewrite of the affected code which
centralises all the computation of the assorted version numbers and
strings into Buildscr, so that they're all more or less alongside each
other rather than scattered across multiple source files.
I've also retired the MD5-based manifest file system. A long time ago,
it seemed like a good idea to arrange that binaries of PuTTY would
automatically cease to identify themselves as a particular upstream
version number if any changes were made to the source code, so that if
someone made a local tweak and distributed the result then I wouldn't
get blamed for the results. Since then I've decided the whole idea is
more trouble than it's worth, so now distribution tarballs will have
version information baked in and people can just cope with that.
[originally from svn r10262]
which pretty much any module can call to request a call-back in the
future. So terminal.c can do its own handling of blinking, visual
bells and deferred screen updates, without having to rely on
term_update() being called 50 times a second (fixes: pterm-timer);
and ssh.c and telnet.c both invoke a new module pinger.c which takes
care of sending keepalives, so they get sent uniformly in all front
ends (fixes: plink-keepalives, unix-keepalives).
[originally from svn r4906]
[this svn revision also touched putty-wishlist]
unwritten design principles, so would-be contributors won't have to
either read our minds or pay _very_ close attention to the code.
[originally from svn r4815]
