HTTP parser/management changes

I've finally committed changes to Lusca which migrate the HTTP Header management routines away from individual malloc/free calls per HTTP Header entry to (hopefully!) one malloc/free for every N. (N being tunable, of course.)

A lot of incremental preparation work was required in the HTTP parser to tidy things up enough to (hopefully!) minimise any impact on stability and functionality.

There really isn't all that much noticable improvement unless you're working on small, embedded platforms with slow CPUs. It's more of a precursor to further optimisation and reorganisation work. The cumulative effect will be worthwhile.

I've released a tarball with the work - r14674 - which also includes a handful of ATF unit tests in the test-suite/atf/ subdirectory.

I'll likely next work on reorganising some more of the FTP and HTTP protocol specific code which can be migrated out of src/ . I'd like to then spend some more time writing unit tests before (hopefully!) finishing off the IPv6 related DNS changes in preparation for more IPv6 related tomfoolery.

Unit testing using ATF

I've been toying around with the NetBSD unit testing framework called "ATF". Unlike other well-known FOSS unit testing software, ATF seems to have relatively comprehensive support for writing unit tests in C - which is quite important for a piece of C software.

In fact, it seems quite a few popular bits of FOSS software handling unit tests, embedded/API documentation, etc all support C rather poorly. I wonder why.

I've not linked the ATF stubs into the main build tree just yet. The ATF code can be found in the source tree under /test-suite/atf/ . It works enough for me to use "make check" on my iBook (yes, that's a pre-intel, PPC G4 iBook) to check that the basic changes I'm making to the HTTP parser code don't introduce new bugs.

I would love some help writing more unit tests though!

The best news is sometimes no news..

Things have been quiet on the Lusca front lately. I poked some of the users who were reporting earlier issues and asked whether said issues were fixed. All of them responded "yes".

So sometimes no news is good news. But you have to sometimes make sure.