Bobulate

Consider the following snippet of C code:

write(1, "foo", 3);
write(1, "bar", 3);
write(1, "", 0); write(1, "", 0);
write(1, "moose", 4);

You expect to get 10 bytes on stdout like this (“foobarmoos”). The 0-byte writes are no-ops. In OpenSolaris, though, we’ve had a long-standing bug in Konsole that makes it hang sometimes. Well, not hang per se, it just ignores all subsequent output from the shell. It took some time before we discovered that it wasn’t hanging, just ignoring output and that you could still interact with the shell (e.g. type “exit”) to recover somewhat.

Various attempts at a fix have been tried. There are two hacks in kdelibs kpty library right now that attempt to address the problem. One accounts for FIONREAD returning 0 bytes available to be read and the other pushes two streams modules on to the terminal. The former doesn’t catch all the cases that block further output, and the latter breaks terminal size setting, which is terribly annoying. Most things assume 80×24 when TIOCGWINSZ fails.

But the basic assumption is that when FIONREAD indicates that there is data available from the terminal, that read() will always return more than 0 bytes and that 0 bytes indicates an end-of-file situation. Testing (and it’s annoying testing, driven from an xterm-only failsafe login with twm) indicates that 0-byte writes drop 0-byte chunks into the stream that kpty sees — a typical sequence is this: FIONREAD returns 10; read() returns 6 bytes (“foobar”); read() returns 0; read() returns 0; read() returns 4. Those two 0-byte reads correspond to the 0-byte writes in the stream, and they tell kpty to close the stream, which in turn stops output from reaching konsole.

I suppose the Linux and FreeBSD terminal subsystems suppress these 0-byte writes; I really don’t know why Solaris does amalgamate non-zero writes (e.g. “foo” followed by “bar” arrives as “foobar”) but keeps 0-byte writes on their own. Maybe it’s a matter of “don’t do 0-byte writes”, but experience shows that 0-byte writes happen all the time, in error messages, when hitting ^C in the shell, and other situations. So on Solaris at least, kpty needs to be armoured against them.

I’m building an updated kdelibs package now, it will hit the package server repo on bionicmutton later today, and I pushed the changes — also with some other Solaris corner cases — into KDE SVN for KDE 4.6 later. It feels good to sit down and finally ferret out a fix.

Q: How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Seven. One to change the lightbulb and six to stand around and go "yeah, I can do that."

That’s one of my favorite guitarist jokes — I play badly enough that I know most of the time I can’t do that, but hey. While the crux of the joke is that those saying they can, aren’t really up-to-snuff, I’ve been going "yeah, we can do that" a lot this week. Where "we" is various KDE applications or technologies. Perhaps they need a little more promo?

First there was this Ars Technica article on Terminator, to which the first comment was "yeah, Konsole can do that" (for years already, at that). And of course emacs, screen, and plenty of others. Makes me think of the way I use Konsole tabs, though. I tend to have one tab per thing-I’m-doing open, all in different directories; for programming projects I tend to have a source-editing and a compilation tab open. Editing means vi, unless I know I’m going to be at it all day, then there’s a Konsole tab from which I run Kate.

Oddly, I never use the window splitting feature; instead I rely on quick tab switching with alt-arrows and the activity indicators in the tabs themselves. I wonder if that’s something to add to the Konsole Userbase page, describing different ways of using Konsole efficiently? A collection of best practices, if you will, or suggested possible workflows with Konsole. That’s a useful addition to the handbook, I think.

Later — might have been via Glyn Moody’s endless twitter stream — I ran into Matt Zimmerman’s "Embracing the Web". Another "wait, what? we do that." To some extent, KDE’s project Silk aims to do just that. First-class web-apps on the desktop? Midgard does that, too with its deployment framework thingy (Henri may correct my pronounciation here). OwnCloud might fill the management gap, and GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) brings things from the web to the desktop. The other direction, I’m not so sure of.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what Matt is after, though. A bigger ecosystem of interoperable web applications (not just services) on a Free Software model (which implies license choices so that cooperation is fostered)? Sure, sign me up — mind that a combination of Quanta Plus (once ported to KDE4) and Silk is probably an awesome development platform and the pervasive support for HTML markup and Javascript in Plasma makes development of web-like applications locally a piece of cake.