[tex-live] Bugs in tlmgr-gui.c

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 06:09:02AM +0100, Samuel Neves wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I found the reason for the XP crash reported by Uwe earlier, and it's not Windows XP-related at all. Looking at tlmgr-gui.c in /trunk/Master/source/tlmgr-gui_UAC.zip, we see:
> 
>     char * get_tl_release() {
>       // read release from release-texlive.txt in root of installation
> 
>       ...
> 
>       char relcontents[200];
> 
>       ...
> 
>       // read start of release file
>       relfile = _wfopen( relfilename, L"rb" );
>       i = fread( relcontents, 1, sizeof( relcontents ), relfile );
>       fclose( relfile );
> 
>       ...
> 
>       cptr = strstr( relcontents, "version 2" );
> 
>       ...
> 
>       return cptr;
> 
>     }
> 
> Two things stand out here:
> 
>  - The function is returning a pointer to a dangling local variable, which is undefined behavior and was working before purely by luck.
> 
>  - If the file 'C:\texlive\2016\release-texlive.txt' does not exist---which was the case in my installation for some reason---it will try to fread out of a NULL pointer, and this was most likely the reason for the crash observed by Uwe.

Thanks for finding the problem!

Norbert Preining suggested to me a better way to get the release.
Should be fixed soon.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg