[Privoxy-devel] how costly is --enable-strptime-sanity-checks ?

[Fabian Keil]

Lee <ler762 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Looking on the bright side, the nice thing about migrating to the
> cygwin cross-compiler is that I get to learn so many new things :)
> 
> How expensive would it be it to have --enable-strptime-sanity-checks
> default to on?

It should be fairly inexpensive. It has been enabled by default by the
FreeBSD port for a couple of years and nobody complained about it.

> dunno if this means anything or not, but this is the rabbit hole I'm
> going down now:
> 
> ./configure --build=i686-pc-cygwin --host=i686-w64-mingw32
> --enable-mingw32  --enable-strptime-sanity-checks  --enable-zlib
> 
> $ grep "Error: Failed to parse" privoxy.log
> 2016-04-29 19:18:50.638 00000270 Error: Failed to parse '' generated
> with '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S' to recreate 'Mon, 1 Jan 2525 00:00:00
[...]
> 2016-04-29 19:18:51.793 0000027c Error: Failed to parse '' generated
> with '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S' to recreate 'Wed, 31 Dec 1969 23:59:59
> GMT'.

I believe a 32 bit time_t would explain these failures.

I hindsight it's a bit disappointing that they haven't been
reported for other platforms so far.

As dates outside the 32 bit range aren't commonly used on the web,
users are unlikely to notice or care about the issue (which will
likely also affect their clients anyway).

BTW, I just committed a change that should result in the problem
being detected slightly sooner. If strftime() fails, there is no
point to try to parse the buffer content.

Fabian
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