[Kst] [Bug 116461] getdata borks when the first field in the format file isn't (ASCII) alphabetically the first field.

[Ted Kisner]

On Tuesday 15 November 2005 17:57, D.V.Wiebe wrote:
> I had no desire to reinvent anything when I wrote defile.  We hacked the
> dirfile writer that Barth wrote when he first wrote getdata out of the
> BLAST flight code because we didn't want it there anymore and repackaged it
> as a groundstation app.  Had I known putData existed at the time, I might
> have looked into it, but I didn't.

Fair enough- I mentioned all this to Barth a couple years ago, but maybe it 
all got lost in his inbox and no one else besides a few people in our lab use 
it ;-)

> That aside, speaking as a getdata user, if these bugs we're encountering
> are already fixed, it would be really nice if they could be incorporated
> into the getdata trunk so we don't have to waste time re-fixing them.

Well, this original bug report mentioned something about a race condition when 
a field in the format file has no data yet.  Is there some reason that 
getdata doesn't just call getNFrames (which should stat the binary file) for 
the desired field and if it doesn't exist or has zero size, then return -1 
from readField?

what am I missing?  

-Ted