Subject: Re: linux-firmware binary corruption with gitweb

From: Pavel Roskin <proski-mXXj517/[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:26:21 -0500

On Wed, 2009-03-04 at 23:52 +0000, Dave wrote:
>         binmode STDOUT, ':raw';
> -        print <$fd>;
> +        #print <$fd>;
> +        $output .= <$fd>;
>         binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; # as set at the beginning of
> gitweb.cgi

Nice catch!

Looking at the gitweb repository from kernel.org, two instances of
circumventing binmode were introduced by this commit:

commit c79ae555fb3c89d91b4cafbfce306e695720507b
Author: John Hawley <[email-masked]>
Date:   Thu Dec 28 21:59:43 2006 -0800

    Last of the changes to deal with channeling the text through the caching
    engine.  Wow is this a total hack.

The original behavior was restored in git_snapshot() by the recent
commit c15229acd9bedf165f1eb05d99fa989d3b9f3e32, but git_blob_plain()
remains broken.

I don't see an easy fix.  We cannot manipulate the blob to counteract
the encoding, as it may not be valid utf-8, and therefore won't be
output in the utf-8 mode.

Maybe binmode should be raw everywhere, and adding to $output should
recode data to utf-8 from other encodings where needed, but it would be
a massive patch, I'm afraid.  Or it would be a small patch requiring
massive testing.

Adding John Hawley to cc:

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin

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