[Geany-devel] Binary files - a hangup fix and some more

[Enrico Tröger]

On Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:37:53 +0300, Алексей wrote:

>> Could you provide a test case to reproduce the problem?
>
>Take some binary/malformed file (a small ZIP archive is a good
>example) and try opening it with the latest SVN version of Geany (that
>can ocassionaly happen). You'll get a hangup with 100% CPU usage. If
>it is OK, try setting a "Default charset for opening files" to some
>1-byte charset (e.g. ISO-8859-1).

Ok, got it.
Committed, thanks.


>> I don't see why we should support this. Geany is a text editor. Text
>> files don't contain NULL bytes. If you want edit binary files, hex
>> editors are more useful, regardless of what Notepad++ does.
>
>They are, but sometimes I want just to see what's inside (given an
>unknown or broken file that I need to extract data from). Even poor
>old Windows notepad can handle binaries - why can't this pretty
>editor? More, some editors (Notepad++ or Midnight Commander's builtin)
>have a builtin Hex editor, which is sometimes useful. I'm using Geany

A hex editor is something completely different from a text editor.
I also use mc's builtin hex editor which is pretty cool and I
especially use it in case I got any files which contain NULL bytes
(for whatever reason).


>> And as you said, make such files opening isn't enough at all, there
>> are certainly many places in Geany which rely on the fact files are
>> real text files and I don't think this is wrong at all. Geany is a
>> text editor.
>
>Sure. Even such simple things as changing file encoding/line endings
>will make a mess from your binary. But if we provide a very basic
>capability - that would be interesting. If we use this feature, there
>must be a warning like "You are opening a binary file in a text
>editor, this can lead to an unexpected result and we strongly
>recommend that you make a backup".
>
>If a plugin crashes or hangs the whole program due to some unusual
>sequence of symbols - that's a problem of this plugin, I think. The
>other question is that the plugin will give unexpected results on
>unusual data - but that's what the end user should be warned and care

Not much doubt about that.
But users still get annoyed and we will get the bug reports about the
crashes...


>I do not intend to make you use my patches (except the first one, if
>you can reproduce my behaviour)- just a proposal I find interesting.

>Is that a costly feature or what speaks against it?

I just find it less useful. Besides Alexey's patch, there are probably
certain other changes necessary to get this working properly, or at
least good enough to put the remaining risks into the users'
responsibility.
For me, the first statement still counts:
Geany is a text editor.
Yes, this is a bit strict but still true.


>At least, nobody would prohibit me to use the patch myself:)

Haha, yeah. That's one of the benefits of the GPL.


Regards,
Enrico

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc
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