Let "el.h" include everything needed for struct editline,
and don't include that stuff multiple times. That also improves
consistency, also avoids circular inclusions, and also makes it
easier to follow what is going on, even though not quite as nice.
But it seems like the best we can do...
el_getc() for the WIDECHAR case, that is, the version in eln.c.
For a UTF-8 locale, it is broken in four ways:
1. If the character read is outside the ASCII range, the function
does an undefined cast from wchar_t to char. Even if wchar_t
is internally represented as UCS-4, that is wrong and dangerous
because characters beyond codepoint U+0255 get their high bits
truncated, meaning that perfectly valid printable Unicode
characters get mapped to arbitrary bytes, even the ASCII escape
character for some Unicode characters. But wchar_t need not
be implemented in terms of UCS-4, so the outcome of this function
is undefined for any and all input.
2. If insufficient space is available for the result, the function
fails to detect failure and returns garbage rather than -1 as
specified in the documentation.
3. The documentation says that errno will be set on failure, but
that doesn't happen either in the above case.
4. Even for ASCII characters, the results may be wrong if wchar_t
is not using UCS-4.
As we have seen before, "histedit.h" can never get rid of including
the <wchar.h> header because using the data types defined there is
deeply ingrained in the public interfaces of libedit.
Now POSIX unconditionally requires that <wchar.h> defines the type
wint_t. Consequently, it can be used unconditionally, no matter
whether WIDECHAR is active or not. Consequently, the #define Int
is pointless.
Note that removing it is not gratuitious churn. Auditing for
integer signedness problems is already hard when only fundamental
types like "int" and "unsigned" are involved. It gets very hard
when types come into the picture that have platform-dependent
signedness, like "char" and "wint_t". Adding yet another layer
on top, changing both the signedness and the width in a platform-
dependent way, makes auditing yet harder, which IMHO is really
dangerous. Note that while removing the #define, i already found
one bug caused by this excessive complication - in the function
re_putc() in refresh.c. If WIDECHAR was defined, it printed an
Int = wint_t value with %c. Fortunately, that bug only affects
debugging, not production. The fix is contained in the patch.
With WIDECHAR, this doesn't change anything. For the case without
WIDECHAR, i checked that none of the places wants to store values
that might not fit in wint_t.
This only changes internal interfaces; public ones remain unchanged.
Next step: Remove #ifdef'ing in read_char(), in the same style
as we did for setlocale(3) in el.c.
A few remarks are required to explain the choices made.
* On first sight, handling mbrtowc(3) seems a bit less trivial
than handling setlocale(3) because its prototype uses the data
type mbstate_t from <wchar.h>. However, it turns out that
"histedit.h" already includes <wchar.h> unconditionally (i don't
like headers including other headers, but that ship has sailed,
people are by now certainly used to the fact that including
"histedit.h" doesn't require including <wchar.h> before), and
"histedit.h" is of course included all over the place. So from
that perspective, there is no problem with using mbrtowc(3)
unconditionally ever for !WIDECHAR.
* However, <wchar.h> also defines the mbrtowc(3) prototype,
so we cannot just #define mbrtowc away, or including the header
will break. It would also be a bad idea to porovide a local
implementation of mbrtowc() and hope that it overrides the one
in libc. Besides, the required prototype is subtly different:
While mbrtowc(3) takes "wchar_t *" as its first argument, we
need a function that takes "Char *". So unfortunately, we have
to keep a ct_mbrtowc #define, at least until we can maybe get
rid of "Char *" in the more remote future.
* After getting rid of the #else clause in read_char(), we can
pull "return 1;" into the default: clause. After that, we can
get rid of the ugly "goto again_lastbyte;" and just "break;".
As a bonus, that also gets rid of the ugly CONSTCOND.
* While here, delete the unused ct_mbtowc() from chartype.h.
If CHARSET_IS_UTF8 is not set, read_char() is broken in a large
number of ways:
1. The isascii(3) check can yield false positives. If a string in
an arbitrary encoding contains a byte in the range 0..127,
that does not at all imply that it forms a character all by
itself, and even less that it represents the same character
as in ASCII. Consequently, read_char() may return characters
the user never typed.
Even if the encoding is not state dependent, the assumption that
bytes in the range 0..127 represent ASCII characters is broken.
Consider UTF-16, for example.
2. The reverse problem can also occur. In an arbitrary encoding,
there is no guarantee that a character that can be represented
by ASCII is represented by a seven-bit byte, and even less by
the same byte as in ASCII.
Even for single-byte encodings, these assumptions are broken.
Consider the ISO 646 national variants, for example.
Consequently, the current code is insufficient to keep ASCII
characters working even for single-byte encodings.
3. The condition "++cbp != 1" can never trigger (because initially,
cbp is 0, and the code can only go back up via the final goto,
which has another cbp = 0 right before it) and it has no effect
(because cbp isn't used afterwards).
4. bytes = ct_mbtowc(cp, cbuf, cbp) is broken. If this returns -1,
the code assumes that is can just call mbtowc(3) again for later
input bytes. In some implementations, that may even be broken
for state-independent encodings, but trying again after mbtowc(3)
failure certainly produces completely erratic and meaningless
results in state-dependent encodings.
5. The assignment "*cp = (Char)(unsigned char)cbuf[0]" is
completely bogus. Even if the byte cbuf[0] represents a
character all by itself, which it usually will not, whether
or not the cast produces the desired result depends on the
internal representation of wchar_t in the C library, which
the application program can know nothing about. Even for ASCII
in the C/POSIX locale, an ASCII character other than '\0' ==
L'\0' == 0 need not have the same numeric value as a char and
as a wchar_t.
To summarize, this code only works if all of the following
conditions hold:
- The encoding is a single-byte encoding.
- ASCII is a subset of the encoding.
- The implementation of mbtowc(3) in the C library does not
require re-initialization after encoding errors.
- The implementation of wchar_t in the C library uses the
same numerical values as ASCII.
Otherwise, it silently produces wrong results.
The simplest way to fix this is to just use the same code as for
UTF-8 (right above). Of course, that causes functional changes
but that shouldn't matter since current behaviour is undefined.
The patch below provides the following improvements:
- It works for all stateless single-byte encodings, no matter
whether they are somehow related to ASCII, no matter how
mb[r]towc(3) are internally implemented, and no matter how
wchar_t is internally represented.
- Instead of producing unpredictable and definitely wrong
results for non-UTF-8 multibyte characters, it behaves in
a well-defined way: It aborts input processing, sets errno,
and returns failure.
Note that short of providing full support for arbitrary locales,
it is impossible to do better. We cannot know whether a given
unsupported locale is state-dependent, and for a state-dependent
locale, it makes no sense to retry parsing after an encoding
error, so the best we can do is abort processing for *any*
unsupported multi-byte character.
- Note that single-byte characters in arbitrary state-independent
locales still work, even in locales that may potentially also
contain multibyte characters, as long as those don't occur in
input. I'm not sure whether any such locales exist in practice...
Tested with UTF-8 and C/POSIX on OpenBSD. Also tested that in the
C/POSIX locale, non-ASCII bytes get through unmangled. You may
wish to test with ISO-LATIN on NetBSD if NetBSD supports that.
----
Also use a constant for meta to avoid warnings.
1. Assume that errno is non-zero when entering read_char()
and that read(2) returns 0 (indicating end of file).
Then, the code will clear errno before returning.
(Obviously, the statement "errno = 0" is almost always
a bug unless there is save_errno = errno right before it
and the previous value is properly restored later,
in all reachable code paths.)
2. When encountering an invalid byte sequence, the code discards
all following bytes until MB_LEN_MAX overflows; consider, for
example, 0xc2 immediately followed by a few valid ASCII bytes.
Three of those ASCII bytes will be discarded.
3. On a POSIX system, EILSEQ will always be set after reading a
valid (yes, valid, not invalid!) UTF-8 character. The reason
is that mbtowc(3) will first be called with a length limit
(third argument) of 1, which will fail, return -1, and - on
a POSIX system - set errno to EILSEQ.
This third bug is mitigated a bit because i couldn't find any
system that actually conforms to POSIX in this respect: None
of OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris 11, and glibc set errno
when an incomplete character is passed to mbtowc(3), even though
that is required by POSIX.
Anyway, that mbtowc(3) bug will be fixed at least in OpenBSD
after release unlock, so it would be good to fix this bug in
libedit before fixing the bug in mbtowc(3).
How can these three bugs be fixed?
1. As far as i understand it, the intention of the bogus errno = 0
is to undo the effects of failing system calls in el_wset(),
sig_set(), and read__fixio() if the subsequent read(2) indicates
end of file. So, restoring errno has to be moved right after
read__fixio(). Of course, neither 0 nor e is the right value
to restore: 0 is wrong if errno happened to be set on entry, e
would be wrong because if one read(2) fails but a second attempt
succeeds after read__fixio(), errno should not be touched. So,
the errno to be restored in this case has to be saved before
calling read(2) for the first time.
2. Solving the second issue requires distinguishing invalid and
incomplete characters, but that is impossible with the function
mbtowc(3) because it returns -1 in both cases and sets errno
to EILSEQ in both cases (once properly implemented).
It is vital that each input character is processed right away.
It is not acceptable to wait for the next input character before
processing the previous one because this is an interactive
library, not a batch system. Consequently, the only situation
where it is acceptable to wait for the next byte without first
processing the previous one(s) is when the previous one(s) form
an incomplete sequence that can be continued to form a valid
character.
Consequently, short of reimplementing a full UTF-8 state machine
by hand, the only correct way forward is to use mbrtowc(3).
Even then, care is needed to always have the state object
properly initialized before using it, and to not discard a valid
ASCII or UTF-8 lead byte if it happens to follow an invalid
sequence.
3. Fortunately, solution 2. also solves issue 3. as a side effect,
by no longer using mbtowc(3) in the first place.
* Document error handling of el_init(), el_set(), el_source(),
and history_init().
* Fix a typo an improve punctuation below H_SETUNIQUE.
* The ellipsis already implies "optional", no need for [].
* Sort options in editrc(5).
* Prevent e.g. rom being misconstrued as the end of a sentence.
* Drop a useless duplicate .Ar macro.
* Put telltc in its proper place in the alphabetical order.
* A few typos in vi editor command names.
* Some missing vi editor command names.
* Some missing author macros.
Do not move the cursor for ed-delete-next-char in emacs mode.
This makes ed-delete-next-char suitable for mapping to the <Delete> key.
Behaviour in vi mode is unchanged (for 'x').
christos