[vdr] Re: [PATCH] fix segfaults because of channels with umlauts

[Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de>]

Ludwig Nussel wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> vdr 1.2.6 segfaults in the "What's on now?" screen if there are
> channels with Umlauts (e.g. WDR Köln). For some reason asprintf
> refuses those channels (Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide
> character). vdr doesn't evaluate the return value of asprintf and
> therefore operates on broken (not necessarily NULL) pointers. I have
> no idea why asprintf suddenly behaves like that, I haven't seen such
> segfaults before.

Have you made any changes to your system lately that might have triggered
this?

Is this "plain vanilla VDR 1.2.6" or are there any patches involved?

I don't have any problems here with VDR 1.3.10. Channels with umlauts
work just fine . This is a SuSE 7.3 system with kernel 2.4.10, in case
that matters. Maybe you're running a system that uses UTF8 or something
like that. If so, you could try turning that off.

> Nevertheless it's a bug in vdr to ignore the
> return value and to not check for NULL. Attached patch is for 1.2.6,
> 1.3.x needs a similar one.

I guess you're right about checking the return value of asprintf().
But first I'd like to know exactly why asprintf() failed on your system.
The typical error mentioned in the GNU C Library Reference Manual for
asprintf() would be a failure to allocate the buffer, which normally
should be pretty unlikely, given the amount of RAM today's systems have...

> Does DVB define an encoding for channel names and EPG or do umlauts
> only work by accident?

The German channels apparently use the ISO-8859-9 character table, so
umlauts work by default.

Klaus