Re: [Nmh-workers] mhfixmsg on a pathological mail

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ken,

> > Well, that's the parsing side;  making the `/subtype' optional.  But
> > the above comment suggests RFC-violating `Content-Type: text' would
> > arrive from ATTMail when they sent to
> > internet!nongnu.org!nmh-workers.
>
> Sure, but ... I'm still trying to understand the difference in this
> code between a zero-length string and NULL.  Maybe this is lost in the
> mists of time.

Maybe.  Perhaps a NULL was the concoct-a-default and the empty string
was empty-in-empty-out.

I do get an error message for this missing subtype, though it's a bit
misleading.  The trailing slash makes the difference.

    $ printf '%s\n' '' '#<foo/' |
    > uip/mhbuild -
    mhbuild: invalid Content-Type: field in message
        /home/ralph/mail/mhbuildG7VTrH (empty subtype for "foo")
    $

> Well, looks like to me that if you feed mhbuild bad input, there is a
> core dump.  That seems like a problem worth fixing for 1.7

Getc() can core dump because readpos is invalid.  Or worse, it can
return some random byte because it can be dereferenced.  If we don't
have users tripping over these and complaining then they probably won't
thank us for delaying 1.7 until there are no known bugs.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy