Tweaked the CKIRCProtocol for Timeouts and Interrupts
Today I was trying to look at the chat interface of one of my apps that uses CKit and has a chat interface. I wanted to make sure that we'd be able to enable logging of individual price updates during the day because some of the support staff in London were getting a little panicked because they're used to this level of logging in another app I've written and frankly, they've come to depend on it.
So I was checking and realized that the chat interface was offline. Odd. It should work. Then it hit me... there was a change I'd made to the chat interface not so long ago (July 23, 2008: Lots of Trouble with MindAlign These Days). But I couldn't remember it. Thank goodness for WordPress! I found the entry where I'd changed the logic on the getReply() method on CKIRCProtocol. I'd had a problem of an infinite loop where I wasn't checking for an error when nothing was returned from the socket. So I changed the code to look like this:
// now read up to the "\n" NEWLINE that the IRC server sends if (!error) { retval = mCommPort.readUpToNEWLINE(); /* * It's possible that the data is empty - but the only way for * that to be acceptable is for a timeout to have occured. So, * if the data is empty and a timeout *didn't* occur, then we * need to disconnect this guy and the next pass through, we'll * be able to connect again and set things up properly - we * hope. */ if (retval.empty() && (errno != ERR_READ_TIMEOUT)) { disconnect(); } }
but that left me in the case today where the return code wasn't an error or a timeout - but in interrupt. What to do? Well... the point of an interrupt is that something caused it to bail, but it's not a problem of the socket per-se. So I needed to really change the code to read:
// now read up to the "\n" NEWLINE that the IRC server sends if (!error) { retval = mCommPort.readUpToNEWLINE(); /* * It's possible that the data is empty - but the only way for * that to be acceptable is for a timeout to have occured. So, * if the data is empty and a timeout *didn't* occur, then we * need to disconnect this guy and the next pass through, we'll * be able to connect again and set things up properly - we * hope. */ if (retval.empty() && (errno == ERR_READ_ERROR)) { disconnect(); } }
so that I'm sure to only bail when there's an error. Timeouts and interrupts don't count. This fixed up the problem and I got it out to the effect apps. Interesting little thing that turned up on linux. Solaris didn't have this issue.