PowerShell / PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH

Enable streamable utf8 <--> utf16 codec

Open
#774 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Issue-Bug
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
8.3k
Forks
819
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

A fundamental issue exists on the Unicode data transition boundary, when the data travels as a stream.

This may manifest as ssh remote sessions breaking down with rare and random failures/aborts.
Ex. https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/767
To decode a Utf8 stream to Utf16 and vice versa, we need a stateful parser that accounts for partial input. The current implementation (that is a simple wrapper on MultiByteToWideChar), simply fails when fed with partial input.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the current UTF-8/UTF-16 codec wrapper around MultiByteToWideChar and inspect how it is used for streamed SSH data. Verify how partial input is handled in both directions, then test that fragmented streams decode without random failures or aborts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.