[cvsnt] Working around 4096 bytes command line size limit

[Jerzy Kaczorowski]

Hartmut,

> I have patched the cvsgui protocol files to work around the 4096 bytes
> command line length limit on NT/2K/XP (it's even shorter on 9x/ME: 256
> bytes).

It's a great news, however it's a very unfortunate timing (more on that
later) :(

>When calling CVS via the cvsgui protocol on Win32 platforms, the
> parameters for CVS would be passed though a temporary file, and only the
> temp file name would be passed to CVS on the command line.

Two issues to be aware here:
1. It's got to be wrapped around or placed within Win32 defines so it
doesn't break the Unix and Mac builds. The idea itself is possibly a good
one for other platforms as well and we might want to make it working on Mac
and Unix as well before it would go out into the wild.
2. Backward compatibility. It has to work with previous versions of
protocol, somehow ;) I would have to see the actual changes to tell how that
can be resolved though.

Now, about the timing.

First of all I am preparing the official release of cvsgui protocol 1.0 as a
separate sources as we speak. That was used for a while and seems stable
enought to let it fly. It means that any patches will have to go thru some
period of testing before it goes official. Definately more than a couple of
days. There were some comments added to the code for documenting purpose
which are not yet in CVSNT tree, so you would have to re-do the patch after
that goes in. We've managed to synchronize the code of CVSNT and CvsGui and
I woould like to keep it synchronized if you don't mind ;)

For details of the latest, final changes please take a look at CvsGui repo,
in the cvsgui/cvsgui_protocol folder:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/cvsgui/cvsgui/cvsgui_protocol
/

Secondly, I might not be able to look after that properly until the July as
my Internet connection will be sketchy and unstable for a couple of weeks. I
have a week or so of stable connection and anything after that is a great
unknown.

The patch is best submitted to our SF page, where it can be reviewed and
processed properly:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=310072&group_id=10072&func=browse

Best Regards,
Jerzy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hartmut Honisch" <hartmut_honisch at web.de>
To: <cvsnt at cvsnt.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2003 8:34 PM
Subject: [cvsnt] Working around 4096 bytes command line size limit


> Tony,
>
> I have patched the cvsgui protocol files to work around the 4096 bytes
> command line length limit on NT/2K/XP (it's even shorter on 9x/ME: 256
> bytes). When calling CVS via the cvsgui protocol on Win32 platforms, the
> parameters for CVS would be passed though a temporary file, and only the
> temp file name would be passed to CVS on the command line. I have been
> testing the patch for a couple of days now, and I have successfully called
> CVSNT from TortoiseCVS with parameters that would have resulted in a
command
> line over 40k in size - but through the temp file, it seems to work fine.
>
> Do you see any possible issues with that workaround?
>
> If we could integrate this patch into CVSNT, it would make life easier for
> us TortoiseCVS developers, because TortoiseCVS would only have to make one
> single call to CVSNT, regardless of how long the command line would get,
> instead of having to loop through multiple calls.
> I also recently had bug reports from users using Win9x who complained that
> they could not enter comments longer that about 200 chars because of the
> command line length limit.
>
> -Hartmut