A potentially serious bug in KIO/kio_http and a possible patch ??

[Dawit A]

Hi,

The attached patch makes it possible for HTTPProtocol::readBuffered function to 
behaves differently when called from readLimited. This patch is intended to 
address the issue of the Gmail chat functionality no longer working in 
kdewebkit based browsers. 

Though the patch fully addresses the aforementioned bug, it really does not fix
the actual cause of this bug. So what is the actual cause ?  Well when you log 
in to Gmail, a check is preformed to see if the chat functionality is enabled 
or not.  This is done through a simple GET request that returns a 20 byte 
response. At that point kio_http has read the header and few bytes of the 
content as well, 3 bytes to be exact. kio_http stores these few bytes of data 
that are not part of the header in a buffer.

It then attempts to read the content and that is where the fun starts... 
Because kio_http has received the actual size of the content it is supposed to 
read, it will use readLimited to get the content. readLimited in turn calls 
readBuffered which, as a result of a fix for bug 180631, always sends whatever 
data was read ahead while retrieving the header above. This means the 3 bytes 
above will be sent to the client first in our case. After that kio_http 
retrieves and attempts to send the remaining 17 bytes. However, this last 
portion never ever makes it to the client application. It seems to disappear 
into the ether! Actually it never gets past KIO::Connection::send and at this 
point I cannot figure out why!

So why this patch then ?  Simple. If you followed what I attempted to explain 
above, you would see that it is very inefficient for kio_http to split a 20 byte 
data especially when it already knows the final size of the content it is 
supposed to retrieve from the server ; so addressing that through this patch 
should be no brainer. The fact that the Gmail chat issue gets fixed as a result 
is only a bonus at this point. 

And hence my request...

#1. Can someone using KHTML verify whether or not the Gmail chat functionality 
works for them ? I cannot get Gmail to work with KHTML here ; so I am unable 
to do this myself.

#2. Can someone tell me if there is a scenario where sending two MSG_DATA 
requests in rapid succession might result in one of them being dropped ?

#3. Any objections, concerns, suggestions etc about the patch are welcome.

Regards,
Dawit A.
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