Re: lynx-dev another largish patch

[Kim DeVaughn]

On Tue, Oct 26, 1999, Klaus Weide (address@hidden) said:
|
| * Protect INSERTFILE and EDITTEXTAREA from generating memory access
|   violations if the inserted file has lines that are too long for
|   the buffer used.  An alert message is issued and the long lines
|   are truncated.  Also don't exit if memory allocation fails for
|   the buffer to hold the whole file, since the only reason for the
|   failure may be that the file is too huge when otherwise lynx has
|   enough memory.

Thanks for adding this, Klaus (it really was on my 2do-list ... just
hadn't found a round tuit yet :-) ).

A few observations, however:

 1. The alert message doesn't show up if the operation was EDITTEXTAREA
    (DWIMEDIT), but does for the INSERTFILE case.

 2. The truncation isn't total.  Only a single char at the length
    boundary gets dropped; additional chars end up being rendered on
    a subsequent line.

    Ie, chars 1-1023 are rendered on the target line, char 1024 gets
    dropped, and chars 1025-nnnn are rendered on the target line plus
    one.

 3. While lynx is normally "quiet" (something I strongly agree with),
    in this case, since data can be lost, might not this be a good place
    to make an exception to that (quiet) behavior, and "beep" the user?
    Also, issuing the alert message twice might be desirable, to be sure
    and give the user enough time to read it.

/kim