On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Robert Dionne
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Klaus,
>
> perhaps I just heard wrong or misinterpreted what was said in the chat
> room. It did seem unusual that calling list_to_atom("foo") twice would add
> more than one atom.
I was wrong about that. I had the idea that I saw or heard from
someone else once that two calls to list_to_atom("foobar") would
create 2 entries in the atom table. Perhaps this was true with older
erlang/otp versions, but certainly not with r14 at least:
Eshell V5.8.2 (abort with ^G)
1> memory(atom_used).
423042
2> list_to_atom("foobar").
foobar
3> memory(atom_used).
430855
4> list_to_atom("foobar").
foobar
5> memory(atom_used).
430855
Going directly to the source, confirms it as well:
https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/dev/erts/emulator/beam/atom.c#L223
>
> On Jan 2, 2011, at 8:26 AM, Klaus Trainer wrote:
>
>> As far as I can remember, the motivation behind list_to_existing_atom
>> was not the fact that list_to_atom pollutes the atoms table during
>> normal operation. However, it won't prevent atom table pollution when
>> something goes wrong or somebody goes malicious (i.e., DoS attack).
>>
>> I've just looked it up for you, the exact description is here:
>> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-829
>>
>>
>> - Klaus
>>
>>
>> On Sun, 2011-01-02 at 08:06 -0500, Bob Dionne (JIRA) wrote:
>>> list_to_existing_atom is too restrictive as used by couch_rep
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> Key: COUCHDB-1004
>>> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1004
>>> Project: CouchDB
>>> Issue Type: Bug
>>> Components: Replication
>>> Environment: erlang
>>> Reporter: Bob Dionne
>>> Priority: Minor
>>>
>>>
>>> We'd like to additional information to db_info in BigCouch, such as the Q
>>> and N constants for a given database. This causes replication to fail when
>>> replicating from BigCouch to CouchDB due to the use of
>>> list_to_existing_atom in couch_rep:dbinfo(...
>>>
>>> The claim is that list_to_atom pollutes the atoms table, however
>>> superficial testing indicates this is not the case, list_to_atom when
>>> called repeatedly seems to work fine. If this is true then consider
>>> reverting list_to_existing_atom back to list_to_atom.
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
--
Filipe David Manana,
[email protected], [email protected]
"Reasonable men adapt themselves to the world.
Unreasonable men adapt the world to themselves.
That's why all progress depends on unreasonable men."
