[Vm-dev] Netscape plugin for Windows again

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Nov 23, 2006, at 2:33 , Andreas Raab wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Great! We also need to get in the fixes in that I added for the  
>> Unix version (attached) and which impara ported to Windows.
>
> So what was the problem? The diff doesn't make much sense to me  
> given that I don't know much about the unix implementation of that  
> stuff ;-)

There were two major problems.

The first does not apply to Windows. It was a bug in the Unix browser  
plugin in the pipe communication with the VM. There was an error  
return code ("resource temporarily not available") on Solaris that I  
never got on Linux, so it was not handled correctly. The symptom was  
that after the Squeakland "project laoding" splash screen the screen  
turned grayish. Took me a while (debugging over the phone) to realize  
this meant the VM simply had crashed. Since I could not reproduce it,  
I was actually flown in to Colorado to debug on-site. Turned out it's  
an EAGAIN error and the cure was to, err, try again. Like, 50,000 times.

The second issue was a cross-platform Mozilla bug, I reported that as  
#359801:

	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359801

The symptom (which I had seen a few years earlier, but never  
investigated in depth) was that inexplicably, some bitmap files could  
not be fetched through the browser API. The workaround I implemented  
was that if the regular fetching as file fails, I do the call again,  
but this time using the streaming API, streaming to our own temporary  
file. Nothing on the Windows VM side needs to change for that, the  
temp files are deleted when the plugin exits (on Unix, the VM deletes  
the file immediately after it was opened).

>> Impara managed to rebuild the OCX recently, with one fix for  
>> fetching long URLs (was limited to like 200 characters or so).
>
> Oh really? Probably some MAX_PATH confusion.

Yep, that was it - it caused the CombineUrlSomething error we  
mentioned a few weeks ago ...

- Bert -