PuTTY wish config-struct

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summary: Remove fixed-length buffers in configuration structure
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.
depends: config-locations
blocks: portfwd-space
priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.
fixed-in: r9214 a1f3b7a358adaa7c2a98359cd0373aa823eeb14b (0.63)

Currently PuTTY uses a single struct (Config) containing a bunch of fixed-length buffers to store its configuration. This leads to problems such as limited space for port forwardings. It should clearly be replaced with a structure containing references to allocated storage.

This isn't entirely trivial, which is probably the main reason we haven't done it yet:

Object housekeeping. Currently, when a Config needs to be duplicated intra-process, a structure copy is usually by and large adequate, with occasional grotty fixing-up of pointers. Similar issues apply to construction and destruction. We'd need to replace this with proper suite of object housekeeping functions.
Serialisation. Currently `Duplicate Session' is implemented by squirting the struct over to another process and crossing our fingers. This is obviously icky, and clearly won't be sufficient when there are more pointers around.
Any textual format we invent to store configuration in a file would probably be suitable for this too; so this should probably wait until we've done that (which we already have to some extent for the Unix port).
Opaque objects. Some platforms may use opaque objects to represent things like filenames. These need to be copyable, serialisable etc.

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2017-04-28 16:52:45 +0100)