[PD-dev] hid crashing (again...) +fixes

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

hi

using hid i had problems with my joystick, crashing immediately as soon
as i used the throttle.

the reason turned out to be a fixed-sized character array which was
limited to 7(!) characters and strcpy'ing names without any checks.
unfortunately my "abs_throttle" is a bit longer than 7 characters.

now i am wondering why all the event-name handling is done via
character-arrays and not with pd symbols?

pollution of the symbol-table can not be the problem, since what is
going on is something like that:
1. (hid_linux): get the name (*char)
2. (hid_linux): copy it to to event_name (char[7])
3. (hid_linux): pass &event_name to hid::hid_output_event()
4. (hid): gensym(event_name) and output it

i don't see any good reason to not generate the t_symbol's much earlier
in the process, in order to allow names of any length (and let pd handle
the allocation):
1. (hid_linux); get the name (char*) and gensym() it
2. (hid_linux): pass the symbol to hid::hid_output_event()
3. (hid): output the symbol

i have committed several changes to the CVS, but since i didn't want to
break the API where i cannot test (osX), i have only changed
hid_linux.c; this complicates the code a bit to:
1. (hid_linux); get the name (char*) and gensym() it
2. (hid_linux): pass the char* in the symbol (s->s_name) to
hid::hid_output_event()
3. (hid): gensym() it again and output
this involves 2 symhashtable lookups instead of just one.

so the question is: is this by (bad) design?

any objections to change (in hid.[ch])
 void hid_output_event(t_hid *x, char *type, char *code, t_float value);
to
 void hid_output_event(t_hid *x, t_symbol*type, t_symbol*code, t_float
value);
??


mfga.sdr.
IOhannes

PS: i also did some other (small) changes, in order to make it possible
to compile this object without having 80MB of code checked out