[Web-SIG] WSGI, cgi.FieldStorage incompatibility

[Guido van Rossum]

On 9/29/06, Michael Kerrin <michael.kerrin at openapp.biz> wrote:
>   But the current implementation of cgi.FieldStorage in the 2.4.4 branch
> and on Python 2.5 does call readline with the size argument. It has
> started to do this in response to the Python bug #1112549 -
> cgi.FieldStorage memory usage can spike in line-oriented ops. See
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1112549&group_id=5470&atid=105470
>
>   Since it is reasonable for a WSGI application to use cgi.FieldStorage
> I am wondering whether cgi.FieldStorage or the WSGI specification needs
> to changed in order to solve this incompatibility.
>
>   Originally I thought it was cgi.FieldStorage that needs to be changed,
> and hence tried to fix it by wrapping the input stream so that the
> readline method always uses the read method on the input stream. While
> this seems to work for me it introduces a level of complexity in the
> cgi.py file, and possible some other bugs, that makes me think that
> adding the size argument for readline into the WSGI specification isn't
> such bad idea after all.

Since that change to cgi.py was a security fix I would strongly
recommend not to remove it and to change the WSGI spec instead.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)