FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 18:42:54 -0700 (PDT), Chad Wagner <vdr781 AT yahoo.com>
wrote:
> --- "James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>
> wrote:
> > Please tell us about anything else you find.  I'm
> > gaining confidence that
> > we're now once more able to handle server-side UCS-2
> 
> The only other thing I found, was that when UCS-2LE
> fails for a iconv conversion the login loops
> continously.  It took me a little while (tracing
> through the application) to figure out that my iconv
> library was so old that it didn't support UCS-2LE.  

Ouch.  We could handle that better, eh?  

> So, possibly, a check in configure for ability to
> convert from UCS-2LE to ISO-8859-1 (or local charset?)
> should be done.  

The current Theory of Operation is that if iconv can't convert, we'll try
the trusty old bash-the-high-byte approach and hope for the best.  We
should emit an error message warning you about what's going on, but I
think atm it's only logged.  

I'll look into why this causes a problem during login.  

> tds_iconv_open() would need to probably communicate
> back some sort of error conditions.  

TDSSOCKET::iconv_info->server_charset->min_bytes_per_char 

would be zero, and 

        TDSSOCKET::iconv_info->to_wire would be -1
and     TDSSOCKET::iconv_info->from_wire would be -1

Probably, we should trap errno at that point (set on failure by
iconv_open) in the TDSICONVINFO structure.  

> I am just not
> familiar enough with the internals, yet, to understand
> how errors are communicated back to application
> layers.  I only learn more about the low level
> packet/communication as I encounter or investigate
> problems.

I appreciate your help and diligence, Chad.  I know it's unpleasant to
learn about broken code from crashing/hanging applications.  Unfortunately
(for you), I'm working in unfamiliar territory with a wide variety of
implementation variables, so the bug potential is masochistically high. 
Thanks for your patience.  :-)

--jkl