[Arsperl-users] ARSPerl 1.93 fix for crash with Windows 7 and 2008

[Glyn D. <gly...@ho...>]

Just wanted to report a fix I found for an issue I was having with ARSperl running on Windows 7 and 2008.
 
I compiled the module using Strawberry Perl with the 7.6.4 version of the Remedy API, and found that test scripts would run as expected on Windows XP or 2003, but that perl would crash on Windows 7 or 2008 reporting an issue with ntdll.dll. I tried different versions of the Remedy API, but hit the same problem.
 
The crash would occur when trying to use the ars_setEntry function, but would only occur when using string fields, not numerical fields.
 
Looking through the source, I tracked down the issue to the sv_to_ARValue, and specifically the use of strdup. It seems that some functionality has changed in Windows somewhere that means when strdup is allocating memory, it's not creating it on general heap? That's all I can assume, as when the code hit the call to FreeARFieldValueList, that's when the crash would actually occur.
 
The workaround has been to update the supportrev.h and supportrev.c files to ensure that the arsperl_strdup function is available when compiling on Windows, not just when compiling on Windows with a non-GNU C compiler. As the arsperl_strdup function then replaces strdup, this fixed the problem, and scripts using ars_SetEntry (ars_CreateEntry and ars_MergeEntry would be affected too by the looks of it) now work correctly on all version of Windows that I've been able to test on.
 
Just wanted to pass this on in case it will help others who hit the same problem!
 
Regards,
 
Glyn