Re: [PATCH] compat: add a getpass() compatibility function

[Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:42 PM, Rafael Gieschke <rafael@gieschke.de> wrote:
>>
>> Am 19.05.2011 um 21:19 schrieb Erik Faye-Lund:
>>
>>> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Rafael Gieschke <rafael@gieschke.de> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Am 19.05.2011 um 20:07 schrieb Erik Faye-Lund:
>>>>> diff --git a/compat/mingw.h b/compat/mingw.h
>>>>> index 62eccd3..e37d557 100644
>>>>> --- a/compat/mingw.h
>>>>> +++ b/compat/mingw.h
>>>>> @@ -48,6 +48,8 @@ typedef int socklen_t;
>>>>> #define EAFNOSUPPORT WSAEAFNOSUPPORT
>>>>> #define ECONNABORTED WSAECONNABORTED
>>>>>
>>>>> +#define PASS_MAX 512
>>>>> +
>>>>
>>>> It might be worth to have this in git-compat-util.h, so it can also be used by compat/getpass.c. I'm not sure about the name, however; it's a remote password and MAX_PASS is about local passwords AFAIK. Maybe PASS_MAX_REMOTE or something similiar. Like that, compat/getpass.c could also be used in case MAX_PASS has some insanely low value on a platform.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> PASS_MAX should be defined in limits.h (which is included by
>>> git-compat-util.h) on POSIX platforms:
>>> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/limits.h.html
>>>
>>> If it turns out it's not on some platforms, perhaps a define-guarded
>>> version would make sense in git-compat-util.h instead.
>>
>> It is defined even on Android :-).
>>
>
> Good to hear.
>
>> But I still wonder whether it's the right thing or if you should use it only for local passwords.
>>
>> If you imagine a platform with MAX_PASS=8, git couldn't connect to an IMAP server with a password of 10 chars on this platform without any proper reason.
>>
>
> Well, those platforms would currently fail, since that's the limit on
> the string returned from getpass. Since that hasn't happened yet, I
> suspect that this is a very theoretical problem.
>
> If we created our own define we could fix such problems by setting
> NO_GETPASS and having a reasonable lengthy GIT_MAX_PASS. But let's
> leave that theoretical fix for when/if it turns out to be real, huh?
>

Whoa: http://www.opengroup.org/csq/view.mhtml?norationale=1&noreferences=1&RID=sun%2FSE2%2F10

It seems that Solaris has a MAX_PASS of 8... That should mean that
prompted passwords can't be above 8 characters there (without using
GIT_ASKPASS). Can this really be the case?