tim Rowledge wrote:
Can somebody remind what the intent of that change was? I'm sure there must've been some reason for it but I think I've missed the discussion of that feature.
We've discussed it several times on this list and others since (believe it or not, I was amazed) November. November 2001 that is...
Oh, I believe it. Coincidentally, this would also be the exact time frame when I moved from the US to Germany and probably wasn't paying close attention ;-)
Part of my liking of the idea is reducing code duplication and the concomitant likelihood of mis-duplication - think of it as a service the VM core offers plugins. Why is hiding one plugin's session ID useful? I can't immediately think of anything devious one could usefully do with this secret info.
Actually it really isn't all that secret (which is part of the problem). If you were to manifacture a file handle you could inspect an existing one and copy the session ID out of it. The one thing it does do is preventing mixing up file handles with other I/O handles if they have the same size and different magic numbers.
Obviously one doesn't have to use this facility but I can't see any reason not to.
True. Although I think it is really valuable if a plugin can verify that a handle is genuine (e.g., actually produced by that plugin). See the following message.
Cheers, - Andreas