Re: PROBLEM REPORT: gnatsweb

[Yngve Svendsen]

At 12:43 28.01.2003 -0800, ken.shaw@mscsoftware.com wrote:
> Tried to usbmit this Problem Report to
> http://bugs.gnu.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?database=gnats
> But the interface refused due to view only permissions:

That is strange -- the interface is supposed to allow submissions from anyone.

> ken.shaw@mscsoftware.com
>
> CATEGORY: gnatsweb
> RELEASE: gnats-3.999.2, gnatsweb-v1.119
> ENVIRONMENT: SUNS - apache server
> DESCRIPTION:
> When a query is executed from the advanced query page and
> then stored in the results page. When the stored query is
> reexecuted (from either the query page or advanced query
> page the stored query returns invalid results. The results
> appear to be the results of a standard query for all PR's.
> If the query is created from the query page and stored the
> query results are always valid.

I am unable to reproduce this specific behaviour, but it is probably 
related to what you observe about cookie size below. I would assume this 
only happens for specific cookie sizes in combination with certain browser 
versions.

> The length of the stored cookie from the advanced query
> page appears to be much longer than from the query page
> and there appears to be leading spaces in the string.

I do not observe leading spaces, but it is correct that cookie length is a 
probable cause for the problems you observe.

> In Netscape (4.7) the invalid results are usually returned.
> But will eventaully return a "BAD REQUEST" error from the
> server and will lockup the Netscape Browser.
>
> Using IE 6.0.2800 this scenario crashes the browser.

Recompiling Apache with an increased DEFAULT_LIMIT_REQUEST_FIELDSIZE should 
help (see item 4 of the TROUBLESHOOTING document that comes with Gnatsweb). 
Buggy browsers will still be a problem, and anyway we're probably beyond 
what cookies really should be used for. What would be a good solution would 
be a session persistence mechanism in the server, allowing user data to be 
stored on the server, but employing that is not planned for Gnatsweb.

There are significant gains to be gotten from stripping the cookie of 
unnecessary query string content, and I will look into that. However, there 
is no solution in sight that will ensure that too long cookies are never 
created.

Yngve Svendsen
Gnatsweb maintainer