Previously, it returned a human-readable string suitable for log
files, which tried to say something useful about the remote end of a
socket. Now it returns a whole SocketPeerInfo structure, of which that
human-friendly log string is just one field, but also some of the same
information - remote IP address and port, in particular - is provided
in machine-readable form where it's available.
That's more directly useful in uxpty.c (which is currently the only
actual client of the function), and also matches the data that SSH
clients send in "pty-req". Also, it makes that method behave more like
the GUI query function get_window_pixels used by terminal.c (with the
sole exception that unlike g_w_p it's allowed to return failure), so
it becomes even more trivial to implement in the GUI front ends.
This is in much the same style as the ttymodes revamp, using a header
file which can be included in different ways to either iterate over
_all_ the signals in the known list or just the ones for which a
definition exists on the target OS.
So this doesn't actually _remove_ the horrid pile of ifdefs in
mainchan_rcvd_exit_signal, but at least it puts it somewhere less
intrusive and more reusable.
This gets another big pile of logic out of ssh2connection and puts it
somewhere more central. Now the only thing left in ssh2connection is
the formatting and parsing of the various channel requests; the logic
deciding which ones to issue and what to do about them is devolved to
the Channel implementation, as it properly should be.
A function to compare two strings _both_ in ptrlen form (I've had
ptrlen_eq_string for ages, but for some reason, never quite needed
ptrlen_eq_ptrlen). A function to ask whether one ptrlen starts with
another (and, optionally, return a ptrlen giving the remaining part of
the longer string). And the va_list version of logeventf, which I
really ought to have written in the first place by sheer habit, even
if it was only needed by logeventf itself.
This is a new vtable-based abstraction which is passed to a backend in
place of Frontend, and it implements only the subset of the Frontend
functions needed by a backend. (Many other Frontend functions still
exist, notably the wide range of things called by terminal.c providing
platform-independent operations on the GUI terminal window.)
The purpose of making it a vtable is that this opens up the
possibility of creating a backend as an internal implementation detail
of some other activity, by providing just that one backend with a
custom Seat that implements the methods differently.
For example, this refactoring should make it feasible to directly
implement an SSH proxy type, aka the 'jump host' feature supported by
OpenSSH, aka 'open a secondary SSH session in MAINCHAN_DIRECT_TCP
mode, and then expose the main channel of that as the Socket for the
primary connection'. (Which of course you can already do by spawning
'plink -nc' as a separate proxy process, but this would permit it in
the _same_ process without anything getting confused.)
I've centralised a full set of stub methods in misc.c for the new
abstraction, which allows me to get rid of several annoying stubs in
the previous code. Also, while I'm here, I've moved a lot of
duplicated modalfatalbox() type functions from application main
program files into wincons.c / uxcons.c, which I think saves
duplication overall. (A minor visible effect is that the prefixes on
those console-based fatal error messages will now be more consistent
between applications.)
This was used by ldisc to communicate back to the front end that a key
had been pressed (or rather, that a keypress had caused a nonzero
amount of session input data). Its only nontrivial implementation was
in gtkwin.c, which used that notification to implement the Unix GUI's
"close window on keypress, if the session was already over" policy.
(Which in turn is Unix-specific, because the rationale is that
sometimes X servers don't have a functioning window manager, so it's
useful to have a way of telling any application to close without using
WM-provided facilities like a close button.)
But gtkwin.c doesn't need to be told by the ldisc that a keypress
happened - it's the one _sending_ those keypresses to ldisc in the
first place! So I've thrown away the three stub implementations of
frontend_keypress, removed the call to it in ldisc.c, and replaced it
with calls in gtkwin.c at all the points during keypress handling
that call ldisc_send.
A visible effect is that pterm's close-on-keypress behaviour will now
only trigger on an actual (input-generating) _keypress_, and not on
other input generation such as a paste action. I think that's an
improvement.
One quite recent - an unused variable in the Windows code that was
obsoleted by commit cea1329b9 last month - and one not recent at all,
namely the obsolete declaration of begin_session() in putty.h that
hasn't existed since commit 7a79df8fe replaced it with the ldisc
system in *2001*!
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.
It's never set to anything but NULL at any call site, and there's been
a FIXME comment in uxucs.c for ages saying it should be removed. I
think it only existed in the first place because it was a facility
supported by the underlying Windows API function and we couldn't see a
reason _not_ to pass it through. But I'm cleaning up FIXMEs, so we
should get rid of it.
(It stood for 'default used', incidentally - as in 'did the function
at any point have to make use of the parameter providing a default
fallback character?'. Nothing to do with _defusing_ things :-)
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.
It is useful to be able to exclude the header so that the log file
can be used for realtime input to other programs such as Kst for
plotting live data from sensors.
We define a macro in terms of INT_MAX, so we ought to include
<limits.h> to ensure INT_MAX is defined, rather than depending on
every call site to have remembered to do that themselves.
In order to list cross-certifiable host keys in the GUI specials menu,
the SSH backend has been inventing new values on the end of the
Telnet_Special enumeration, starting from the value TS_LOCALSTART.
This is inelegant, and also makes it awkward to break up special
handlers (e.g. to dispatch different specials to different SSH
layers), since if all you know about a special is that it's somewhere
in the TS_LOCALSTART+n space, you can't tell what _general kind_ of
thing it is. Also, if I ever need another open-ended set of specials
in future, I'll have to remember which TS_LOCALSTART+n codes are in
which set.
So here's a revamp that causes every special to take an extra integer
argument. For all previously numbered specials, this argument is
passed as zero and ignored, but there's a new main special code for
SSH host key cross-certification, in which the integer argument is an
index into the backend's list of available keys. TS_LOCALSTART is now
a thing of the past: if I need any other open-ended sets of specials
in future, I can add a new top-level code with a nicely separated
space of arguments.
While I'm at it, I've removed the legacy misnomer 'Telnet_Special'
from the code completely; the enum is now SessionSpecialCode, the
struct containing full details of a menu entry is SessionSpecial, and
the enum values now start SS_ rather than TS_.
Originally, it controlled whether ssh.c should send terminal messages
(such as login and password prompts) to terminal.c or to stderr. But
we've had the from_backend() abstraction for ages now, which even has
an existing flag to indicate that the data is stderr rather than
stdout data; applications which set FLAG_STDERR are precisely those
that link against uxcons or wincons, so from_backend will do the
expected thing anyway with data sent to it with that flag set. So
there's no reason ssh.c can't just unconditionally pass everything
through that, and remove the special case.
FLAG_STDERR was also used by winproxy and uxproxy to decide whether to
capture standard error from a local proxy command, or whether to let
the proxy command send its diagnostics directly to the usual standard
error. On reflection, I think it's better to unconditionally capture
the proxy's stderr, for three reasons. Firstly, it means proxy
diagnostics are prefixed with 'proxy:' so that you can tell them apart
from any other stderr spew (which used to be particularly confusing if
both the main application and the proxy command were instances of
Plink); secondly, proxy diagnostics are now reliably copied to packet
log files along with all the other Event Log entries, even by
command-line tools; and thirdly, this means the option to suppress
proxy command diagnostics after the main session starts will actually
_work_ in the command-line tools, which it previously couldn't.
A more minor structure change is that copying of Event Log messages to
stderr in verbose mode is now done by wincons/uxcons, instead of
centrally in logging.c (since logging.c can now no longer check
FLAG_STDERR to decide whether to do it). The total amount of code to
do this is considerably smaller than the defensive-sounding comment in
logevent.c explaining why I did it the other way instead :-)
Now there's a centralised routine in misc.c to do the sanitisation,
which copies data on to an outgoing bufchain. This allows me to remove
from_backend_untrusted() completely from the frontend API, simplifying
code in several places.
Two use cases for untrusted-terminal-data sanitisation were in the
terminal.c prompts handler, and in the collection of SSH-2 userauth
banners. Both of those were writing output to a bufchain anyway, so
it was very convenient to just replace a bufchain_add with
sanitise_term_data and then not have to worry about it again.
There was also a simplistic sanitiser in uxcons.c, which I've now
replaced with a call to the good one - and in wincons.c there was a
FIXME saying I ought to get round to that, which now I have!
Most of these were 'void *' because they weren't even reliably a
structure type underneath - the per-OS storage systems would directly
cast read/write/enum settings handles to and from random things like
FILE *, Unix DIR *, or Windows HKEY. So I've wrapped them in tiny
structs for the sake of having a sensible structure tag visible
elsewhere in the code.
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.
Nearly every part of the code that ever handles a full backend
structure has historically done it using a pair of pointer variables,
one pointing at a constant struct full of function pointers, and the
other pointing to a 'void *' state object that's passed to each of
those.
While I'm modernising the rest of the code, this seems like a good
time to turn that into the same more or less type-safe and less
cumbersome system as I'm using for other parts of the code, such as
Socket, Plug, BinaryPacketProtocol and so forth: the Backend structure
contains a vtable pointer, and a system of macro wrappers handles
dispatching through that vtable.
Same principle again - the more of these structures have globally
visible tags (even if the structure contents are still opaque in most
places), the fewer of them I can mistake for each other.
That's one fewer anonymous 'void *' which might be accidentally
confused with some other pointer type if I misremember the order of
function arguments.
While I'm here, I've made its pointer-nature explicit - that is,
'Ldisc' is now a typedef for the structure type itself rather than a
pointer to it. A stylistic change only, but it feels more natural to
me these days for a thing you're going to eventually pass to a 'free'
function.
This commit adds the new ids and fingerprints in the keys appendix of
the manual, and moves the old ones down into the historic-keys
section. I've tweaked a few pieces of wording for ongoing use, so that
they don't imply a specific number of past key rollovers.
The -pgpfp option in all the tools now shows the new Master Key
fingerprint and the previous (2015) one. I've adjusted all the uses of
the #defines in putty.h so that future rollovers should only have to
modify the #defines themselves.
Most importantly, sign.sh bakes in the ids of the current release and
snapshot keys, so that snapshots will automatically be signed with the
new snapshot key and the -r option will invoke the new release key.
Like the corresponding rewrite of conf serialisation, this affects not
just conf_deserialise itself but also the per-platform filename and
fontspec deserialisers.
This is a cleanup I started to notice a need for during the BinarySink
work. It removes a lot of faffing about casting things to char * or
unsigned char * so that some API will accept them, even though lots of
such APIs really take a plain 'block of raw binary data' argument and
don't care what C thinks the signedness of that data might be - they
may well reinterpret it back and forth internally.
So I've tried to arrange for all the function call APIs that ought to
have a void * (or const void *) to have one, and those that need to do
pointer arithmetic on the parameter internally can cast it back at the
top of the function. That saves endless ad-hoc casts at the call
sites.
There was a time, back when the USA was more vigorously against
cryptography, when we toyed with the idea of having a version of PuTTY
that outsourced its cryptographic primitives to the Microsoft optional
encryption API, which would effectively create a tool that acted like
PuTTY proper on a system with that API installed, but automatically
degraded to being PuTTYtel on a system without, and meanwhile (so went
the theory) it could be moved freely across national borders with
crypto restrictions, because it didn't _contain_ any of the actual
crypto.
I don't recall that we ever got it working at all. And certainly the
vestiges of it here and there in the current code are completely
unworkable - they refer to an 'mscrypto.c' that doesn't even exist,
and the ifdefs in the definitions of structures like RSAKey and
MD5Context are not matched by any corresponding ifdefs in the code. So
I ought to have got round to removing it long ago, in order to avoid
misleading anyone.
This simplifies the client code both in ssh.c and in the client side
of Pageant.
I've cheated a tiny bit by preparing agent requests in a strbuf that
has space reserved at the front for the packet frame, which makes life
easier for the code that sends them off.
Now instead of iterating through conf twice in separate functions,
once to count up the size of the serialised data and once to write it
out, I just go through once and dump it all in a strbuf.
(Of course, I could still do a two-pass count-then-allocate approach
easily enough in this system; nothing would stop me writing a
BinarySink implementation that didn't actually store any data and just
counted its size, and then I could choose at each call site whether I
preferred to do it that way.)
This centralises a few things that multiple header files were
previously defining, and were protecting against each other's
redefinition with ifdefs - small things like structs and typedefs. Now
all those things are in a defs.h which is by definition safe to
include _first_ (out of all the codebase-local headers) and only need
to be defined once.
This seems to be a knock-on effect of my recent reworking of the SSH
code to be based around queues and callbacks. The loop iteration
function in uxsftp.c (ssh_sftp_do_select) would keep going round its
select loop until something had happened on one of its file
descriptors, and then return to the caller in the assumption that the
resulting data might have triggered whatever condition the caller was
waiting for - and if not, then the caller checks, finds nothing
interesting has happened, and resumes looping with no harm done.
But now, when something happens on an fd, it doesn't _synchronously_
trigger the follow-up condition PSFTP was waiting for (which, at
startup time, happens to be back->sendok() starting to return TRUE).
Instead, it schedules a callback, which will schedule a callback,
which ... ends up setting that flag. But by that time, the loop
function has already returned, the caller has found nothing
interesting and resumed looping, and _now_ the interesting thing
happens but it's too late because ssh_sftp_do_select will wait until
the next file descriptor activity before it next returns.
Solution: give run_toplevel_callbacks a return value which says
whether it's actually done something, and if so, return immediately in
case that was the droid the caller was looking for. As it were.
NFC for the moment, because the bufchain is always specially
constructed to hold exactly the same data that would have been passed
in to the function as a (pointer,length) pair. But this API change
allows get_userpass_input to express the idea that it consumed some
but not all of the data in the bufchain, which means that later on
I'll be able to point the same function at a longer-lived bufchain
containing the full stream of keyboard input and avoid dropping
keystrokes that arrive too quickly after the end of an interactive
password prompt.
This is a set of convenience wrappers around the existing toplevel
callback function, which arranges to avoid scheduling a second call to
a callback function if one is already in the queue.
Just like the last few commits, this is a piece of infrastructure that
nothing is yet using. But it will.
NFC: this is a preliminary refactoring, intended to make my life
easier when I start changing around the APIs used to pass user
keyboard input around. The fewer functions even _have_ such an API,
the less I'll have to do at that point.
Thanks to Jiri Kaspar for sending this patch (apart from the new docs
section, which is in my own words), which implements a feature we've
had as a wishlist item ('utf8-plus-vt100') for a long time.
I was actually surprised it was possible to implement it in so few
lines of code! I'd forgotten, or possibly never noticed in the first
place, that even in UTF-8 mode PuTTY not only accepts but still
_processes_ all the ISO 2022 control sequences and shift characters,
and keeps running track of all the same state in term->cset and
term->cset_attrs that it tracks in IS0-2022-enabled modes. It's just
that in UTF-8 mode, at the very last minute when a character+attribute
pair is about to be written into the terminal's character buffer, it
deliberately ignores the contents of those variables.
So all that was needed was a new flag checked at that last moment
which causes it not quite to ignore them after all, and bingo,
utf8-plus-vt100 is supported. And it works no matter which ISO 2022
sequences you're using; whether you're using ESC ( 0 to select the
line drawing set directly into GL and ESC ( B to get back when you're
done, or whether you send a preliminary ESC ( B ESC ) 0 to get GL/GR
to be ASCII and line drawing respectively so you can use SI and SO as
one-byte mode switches thereafter, both work just as well.
This implementation strategy has a couple of consequences, which I
don't think matter very much one way or the other but I document them
just in case they turn out to be important later:
- if an application expecting this mode has already filled your
terminal window with lqqqqqqqqk, then enabling this mode in Change
Settings won't retroactively turn them into the line drawing
characters you wanted, because no memory is preserved in the screen
buffer of what the ISO 2022 state was when they were printed. So
the application still has to do a screen refresh.
- on the other hand, if you already sent the ESC ( 0 or whatever to
put the terminal _into_ line drawing mode, and then you turn on
this mode in Change Settings, you _will_ still be in line drawing
mode, because the system _does_ remember your current ISO 2022
state at all times, whether it's currently applying it to output
printing characters or not.
Commit d515e4f1a went through a lot of very different shapes before it
was finally pushed. In some of them, GSS kex had its own value in the
kex enumeration, but it was used in ssh.c but not in config.c
(because, as in the final version, it wasn't configured by the same
drag-list system as the rest of them). So we had to distinguish the
set of key exchange ids known to the program as a whole from the set
controllable in the configuration.
In the final version, GSS kex ended up even more separated from the
kex enumeration than that: the enum value KEX_GSS_SHA1_K5 isn't used
at all. Instead, GSS key exchange appears in the list at the point of
translation from the list of enum values into the list of pointers to
data structures full of kex methods.
But after all the changes, everyone involved forgot to revert the part
of the patch which split KEX_MAX in two and introduced the pointless
value KEX_GSS_SHA1_K5! Better late than never: I'm reverting it now,
to avoid confusion, and because I don't have any reason to think the
distinction will be useful for any other purpose.
The former has advantages in terms of keeping Kerberos credentials up
to date, but it also does something sufficiently weird to the usual
SSH host key system that I think it's worth making sure users have a
means of turning it off separately from the less intrusive GSS
userauth.
This is a heavily edited (by me) version of a patch originally due to
Nico Williams and Viktor Dukhovni. Their comments:
* Don't delegate credentials when rekeying unless there's a new TGT
or the old service ticket is nearly expired.
* Check for the above conditions more frequently (every two minutes
by default) and rekey when we would delegate credentials.
* Do not rekey with very short service ticket lifetimes; some GSSAPI
libraries may lose the race to use an almost expired ticket. Adjust
the timing of rekey checks to try to avoid this possibility.
My further comments:
The most interesting thing about this patch to me is that the use of
GSS key exchange causes a switch over to a completely different model
of what host keys are for. This comes from RFC 4462 section 2.1: the
basic idea is that when your session is mostly bidirectionally
authenticated by the GSSAPI exchanges happening in initial kex and
every rekey, host keys become more or less vestigial, and their
remaining purpose is to allow a rekey to happen if the requirements of
the SSH protocol demand it at an awkward moment when the GSS
credentials are not currently available (e.g. timed out and haven't
been renewed yet). As such, there's no need for host keys to be
_permanent_ or to be a reliable identifier of a particular host, and
RFC 4462 allows for the possibility that they might be purely
transient and only for this kind of emergency fallback purpose.
Therefore, once PuTTY has done a GSS key exchange, it disconnects
itself completely from the permanent host key cache functions in
storage.h, and instead switches to a _transient_ host key cache stored
in memory with the lifetime of just that SSH session. That cache is
populated with keys received from the server as a side effect of GSS
kex (via the optional SSH2_MSG_KEXGSS_HOSTKEY message), and used if
later in the session we have to fall back to a non-GSS key exchange.
However, in practice servers we've tested against do not send a host
key in that way, so we also have a fallback method of populating the
transient cache by triggering an immediate non-GSS rekey straight
after userauth (reusing the code path we also use to turn on OpenSSH
delayed encryption without the race condition).
This is a preliminary refactoring for an upcoming change which will
need to affect every use of schedule_timer to wait for the next rekey:
those calls to schedule_timer are now centralised into a function that
does an organised piece of thinking about when the next timer should
be.
A side effect of this change is that the translation from
CONF_ssh_rekey_time to an actual tick count is now better proofed
against integer overflow (just in case the user entered a completely
silly value).
This is a mild security measure against malicious clipboard-writing.
It's only mild, because of course there are situations in which even a
sanitised paste could be successfully malicious (imagine someone
managing to write the traditional 'rm -rf' command into your clipboard
when you were going to paste to a shell prompt); but it at least
allows pasting into typical text editors without also allowing the
control sequence that exits the editor UI and returns to the shell
prompt.
This is a configurable option, because there's no well defined line to
be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable pastes, and it's very
plausible that users will have sensible use cases for pasting things
outside the list of permitted characters, or cases in which they know
they trust the clipboard-writer. I for one certainly find it useful on
occasion to deliberately construct a paste containing control
sequences that automate a terminal-based UI.
While I'm at it, when bracketed paste mode is enabled, we also prevent
pasting of data that includes the 'end bracketed paste' sequence
somewhere in the middle. I really _hope_ nobody was treating bracketed
paste mode as a key part of their security boundary, but then again, I
also can't imagine that anyone had an actually sensible use case for
deliberately making a bracketed paste be only partly bracketed, and
it's an easy change while I'm messing about in this area anyway.
On all platforms, you can now configure which clipboard the mouse
pastes from, which clipboard Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins access, and which
Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V access. In each case, the options are:
- nothing at all
- a clipboard which is implicitly written by the act of mouse
selection (the PRIMARY selection on X, CLIP_LOCAL everywhere else)
- the standard clipboard written by explicit copy/paste UI actions
(CLIPBOARD on X, the unique system clipboard elsewhere).
Also, you can control whether selecting text with the mouse _also_
writes to the explicitly accessed clipboard.
The wording of the various messages changes between platforms, but the
basic UI shape is the same everywhere.
This stores the last text selected in _this_ terminal, regardless of
whether any other application has since taken back whatever system
clipboard we also copied it to. It's written unconditionally whenever
text is selected in terminal.c.
The main purpose of this will be that it's also the place that you can
go and find the data you need to write to a system clipboard in
response to an explicit Copy operation. But it can also act as a data
source for pastes in its own right, so you can use it to implement an
intra-window private extra clipboard if that's useful. (OS X Terminal
has one of those, so _someone_ at least seems to like the idea.)
This lays some groundwork for making PuTTY's cut and paste handling
more flexible in the area of which clipboard(s) it reads and writes,
if more than one is available on the system.
I've introduced a system of list macros which define an enumeration of
integer clipboard ids, some defined centrally in putty.h (at present
just a CLIP_NULL which never has any text in it, because that seems
like the sort of thing that will come in useful for configuring a
given copy or paste UI action to be ignored) and some defined per
platform. All the front end functions that copy and paste take a
clipboard id, and the Terminal structure is now configured at startup
to tell it which clipboard id it should paste from on a mouse click,
and which it should copy from on a selection.
However, I haven't actually added _real_ support for multiple X11
clipboards, in that the Unix front end supports a single CLIP_SYSTEM
regardless of whether it's in OS X or GTK mode. So this is currently a
NFC refactoring which does nothing but prepare the way for real
changes to come.
It's actually a function specific to the Windows front end, and has
been all along - but I've only just noticed that no other front end
either uses it or defines it.
Previously, both the Unix and Windows front ends would respond to a
paste action by retrieving data from the system clipboard, converting
it appropriately, _storing_ it in a persistent dynamic data block
inside the front end, and then calling term_do_paste(term), which in
turn would call back to the front end via get_clip() to retrieve the
current contents of that stored data block.
But, as far as I can tell, this was a completely pointless mechanism,
because after a data block was written into this storage area, it
would be immediately used for exactly one paste, and then never
accessed again until the next paste action caused it to be freed and
replaced with a new chunk of pasted data.
So why on earth was it stored persistently at all, and why that
callback mechanism from frontend to terminal back to frontend to
retrieve it for the actual paste action? I have no idea. This change
removes the entire system and replaces it with the completely obvious
alternative: the character-set-converted version of paste data is
allocated in a _local_ variable in the frontend paste functions,
passed directly to term_do_paste which now takes (buffer,length)
parameters, and freed immediately afterwards. get_clip() is gone.
This is another piece of long-overdue refactoring similar to the
recent commit e3796cb77. But where that one dealt with normalisation
of stuff already stored _in_ a Conf by whatever means (including, in
particular, handling a user typing 'username@host.name' into the
Hostname box of the GUI session dialog box), this one deals with
handling argv entries and putting them into the Conf.
This isn't exactly a pure no-functional-change-at-all refactoring. On
the other hand, it isn't a full-on cleanup that completely
rationalises all the user-visible behaviour as well as the code
structure. It's somewhere in between: I've preserved all the behaviour
quirks that I could imagine a reason for having intended, but taken
the opportunity to _not_ faithfully replicate anything I thought was
clearly just a bug.
So, for example, the following inconsistency is carefully preserved:
the command 'plink -load session nextword' treats 'nextword' as a host
name if the loaded session hasn't provided a hostname already, and
otherwise treats 'nextword' as the remote command to execute on the
already-specified remote host, but the same combination of arguments
to GUI PuTTY will _always_ treat 'nextword' as a hostname, overriding
a hostname (if any) in the saved session. That makes some sense to me
because of the different shapes of the overall command lines.
On the other hand, there are two behaviour changes I know of as a
result of this commit: a third argument to GUI PuTTY (after a hostname
and port) now provokes an error message instead of being silently
ignored, and in Plink, if you combine a -P option (specifying a port
number) with the historical comma-separated protocol selection prefix
on the hostname argument (which I'd completely forgotten even existed
until this piece of work), then the -P will now override the selected
protocol's default port number, whereas previously the default port
would win. For example, 'plink -P 12345 telnet,hostname' will now
connect via Telnet to port 12345 instead of to port 23.
There may be scope for removing or rethinking some of the command-
line syntax quirks in the wake of this change. If we do decide to do
anything like that, then hopefully having it all in one place will
make it easier to remove or change things consistently across the
tools.
