[PATCH] cli/crypto: fix segfault on failed gmime2 crypto context creation

[David Bremner]

Jani Nikula <jani at nikula.org> writes:
>
> So while the right thing to do would be to handle NULL returns
> properly all over the place, and we have other scenarios that do
> return NULL from above mentioned functions, the crypto context
> creation failure is something that does seem to show up regularly in
> some scenarios, revert back to the functionality before commit
> 1fdc08d0ffab as an interim fix.

I'm not sure how interim this is. Are we ready to deprecate gmime-2.6 in
the next release?

As you mention, even if this particular NULL return goes away, the code
is still somehow broken in terms of checking for NULL returns from
_mime_node_create (and propagating / handling them).  I previously wrote
a patch that did that work [1], but this turns out to be not so helpful,
since we arrive at the formatted output with a NULL pointer.

It occurred to me that we could add an error code and/or string to the
mime-node structure, and then never return NULL from _mime_node_create
except for OOM. Then we could actually report useful errors in the
structured output [2].  If that seems like a reasonable plan, then I
guess I could live with this interim fix to get master working for
people again.

Is this an important important enough issue that we should think about a
point release?

[1] id:20170901001014.7610-1-david at tethera.net

[2] the notion of reporting errors on stderr for the CLI makes much less
    sense for the structured output case