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Remove support for the "command" encoder

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The "command" encoder was mostly intended for use in `%rename` - most
uses can be achieved using the "regex" encoder, so we recommend using
that instead.

The "command" encoder suffers from a number of issues - as the
documentation for it admitted, "[it] is extremely slow compared to all
the other [encoders] as it involves spawning a separate process and
using it for many declarations is not recommended" and that it "should
generally be avoided because of performance considerations".

But it's also not portable.  The design assumes that `/bin/sh` supports
`<<<` but that's a bash-specific feature so it doesn't work on platforms
where `/bin/sh` is not bash - it fails on Debian, Ubuntu and probably
some other Linux distros, plus most non-Linux platforms.  Microsoft
Windows doesn't even have a /bin/sh as standard.

Finally, no escaping of the passed string is done, so it has potential
security issues (though at least with %rename the input is limited to
valid C/C++ symbol names).

Fixes #1806
This commit is contained in:
Olly Betts 2022-02-07 09:47:01 +13:00
commit 467c530e65
6 changed files with 36 additions and 56 deletions
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@ -7,6 +7,29 @@ the issue number to the end of the URL: https://github.com/swig/swig/issues/
Version 4.1.0 (in progress)
===========================
2022-02-07: olly
#1806 Remove support for the "command" encoder, which was mostly
intended for use in `%rename` - most uses can be achieved using
the "regex" encoder, so we recommend using that instead.
The "command" encoder suffers from a number of issues - as the
documentation for it admitted, "[it] is extremely slow compared to
all the other [encoders] as it involves spawning a separate process
and using it for many declarations is not recommended" and that it
"should generally be avoided because of performance
considerations".
But it's also not portable. The design assumes that `/bin/sh`
supports `<<<` but that's a bash-specific feature so it doesn't
work on platforms where `/bin/sh` is not bash - it fails on
Debian, Ubuntu and probably some other Linux distros, plus most
non-Linux platforms. Microsoft Windows doesn't even have a
/bin/sh as standard.
Finally, no escaping of the passed string is done, so it has
potential security issues (though at least with %rename the input
is limited to valid C/C++ symbol names).
2022-02-06: olly
#2193 -DFOO on the SWIG command line now sets FOO to 1 for
consistency with C/C++ compiler preprocessors. Previously