Re: mutt freezes when fed high character in header
* Derek Martin on Wednesday, July 04, 2007 at 08:36:01 -0400:
> On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 09:57:42AM +0200, Christian Ebert wrote:
>> But I still believe that Mutt should not just *freeze* in case of
>> an iconv failure, but give the user some means to isolate the
>> message (including removing it from the mailbox) ...
>
> If it is a bug in the iconv library (which Mutt uses), and mutt is
> freezing up in the iconv code rather than its own, that is
> unfortunately technically impossible.
Ok.
I don't know what changed from iconv 9 -> 11, but it might worth
looking into what exactly iconv does in the old version, because
when I ran iconv 9 from the command line on the message in
question, it gives exactly the same output to stderr as iconv 11:
iconv: conversion to iso-8859-i unsupported
iconv: try 'iconv -l' to get the list of supported encodings
So, iconv 9, the program, somehow /can/ handle this w/o freeze.
> If Mutt were calling iconv as an external program, it would be
> technically possible, but it would be a really ugly hack that would
> not be worth doing.
I understand, and -- layman's speak here -- the change in iconv
might've been in the /library/ not the program, but perhaps there
is some way to catch what the library says from Mutt like old
iconv, the program, does.
I'm only advocating this -- not complaining! -- because IMHO this
behaviour might be /very/ off-putting, especially for potential
new users who don't have the ability/nerve/time to upgrade iconv
outside of their distribution.
c
--
Python Mutt utilities <http://www.blacktrash.org/hg/muttils/>