Re: 3rd Party compatibility

[John Darrington]

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 06:33:10PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > All right.  I'll see how much effort it'll be to make it work.
     > But if it turns out to be a real nightmare, then I'm not going 
     > to spend a lot of time on it, unless there's a huge demand to 
     > be able to parse these files.
     
     If you don't feel like dealing with it, just go ahead and file a
     wishlist bug.  I'll take a look at it myself, later.

I've had a look and it's actually not too bad.  All the changes are 
confined to sfm-read.c The main implications are:

1) We have to use realloc, since we no longer know how many records to
   allocate.  This could be slower and lead to memory fragmentation.

2) I have to implement a new function buf_unread which calls fseek to 
   wind back the sysfile after it's found the last variable record.
   fseek makes me a bit worried.  I don't know how portable it is.


I suppose it would be possible to use the case_size value if it's valid
(case_size != -1) , and otherwise do it the nasty way.  But then who
knows if some product might come up with a system file which gives an
apparantly valid, but incorrect value ....

Ben, where did you get the information for the format descibed in
Appendix D of the manual?  Did you just reverse engineer it, or find it
written somewhere?

J'

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