Acorn User 3/AUCD3.iso/airport/browsers/acornet/archive/archive897/000133_owner-acornet@…s.barnet.ac.uk _Wed Aug 27 22:04:32 1997.msg

Internet Message Format | 1997-08-28 | 4KB

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Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 21:34:24 +0100
From: Joseph Heenan <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Acornet 0.20 - a few suggestions
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In message <[e-mail]>
          Stewart Brodie <[e-mail]> wrote:

> [bootapps crashing when Acornet is run from
> ADFS::IDEDisc4.Internet.!Acornet ]
>
> This is a complete stab in the dark, but it's a daft problem that
> I've hit in the past and if it turns out to be your problem too,
> you'll never find it easily :-)
>
> What rings a bell is the changing of the directory names making it
> work ... Obviously the actually name of the directory cannot affect
> the working of the applications unless that the pathnames have been
> hardwired in.  This would seem to imply that pathnames of a
> particular *length* are causing problems - perhaps when they are an
> exact multiple of four.  Check all the length limited string
> handling in the program.  If, for example, you were to say:
>
> const int length = strlen(s1);
> char *const p = calloc(1, length);
> memcpy(p, s1, length);
>
> Then this would work[1] *UNLESS* the length of s1 was an exact multiple of
> four.....
> [snip]

I'd be frantically digging round in my source code now, but for
bootapps being a BASIC program. Now I refuse to believe that BASIC
has a bug in it's string handling that could convert
"ADFS::IDEDisc4.$.Internet.Acornet.Resources.!WebHelper" into
".!WebHelper.!Help" (the error message you see is that file not
found), because it's just too b'zarre.

(I tried putting Acornet in a deeper directory structure too, whilst
testing. Contrary to popular believe, things seemed to work perfectly
until it approached somewhere around the 180 character length, as far
as I could tell)

So, for want of something better to blame, I'm guessing that it's
actually a bug in the RiscOS 3.11 filer, of the sort you describe
(triggered by a string that is a multiple of words long give or take
the terminator). The only sure thing I'm not sure of is the trigger
condition - it won't happen when you just filer_boot the file on it's
own, only when it's done in the order bootapps does it, or without
returning to the desktop or some such.

I haven't tried very hard to trace the cause, as I feel I'd probably
just drawn a blank, and I also don't seem to be able to reproduce it
on my RiscPC. I think the best we can do is just make people aware of
the problem, and aware of the renaming-the-directory-one-char-shorter
solution.

Cheers,

Joseph

--
Joseph Heenan, Coventry, UK
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