Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 22 Oct 1998 08:26:07 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
To:        dag-erli@ifi.uio.no (Dag-Erling C. =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= )
Cc:        Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au>, Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/lib/libc/stdio mktemp.c
Message-ID:  <199810221526.IAA13589@apollo.backplane.com>
References:  <199810210245.KAA14596@spinner.netplex.com.au> <199810210437.VAA01979@apollo.backplane.com> <xzpvhleqo8u.fsf@grjottunagard.ifi.uio.no> <199810211608.JAA06244@apollo.backplane.com> <xzphfwxt2fp.fsf@hrotti.ifi.uio.no>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

:Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> writes:
:
:I was referring to the argument about whether or not fclose() should
:dump core when passed a NULL pointer.
:
:DES

    Let me throw one back at you:  should one be able to call vprintf()
    with NULL for the file or vsprintf() with NULL for the buffer and have
    them return the number of characters they would have printed?  That came
    up five years ago while I was working on DICE (My 68000 C compiler).

    There are a thousand little hacks people have done to standard library
    routines in the past.  Had I implemented those and other hacks, I would
    never have been able to port my code from the Amiga to, say, FreeBSD, 
    without a hellofalot more work.

    It is generally a real *bad* idea to implement any such hacks for 
    precisely that reason.  Unless *everyone* imlements the same hack,
    all that happens is that anyone writing code using the hack has to rip
    it out again when they port the code to another platform.  Implementing
    these hacks does nobody any favors, believe me.

    But things like vsprintf(NULL, ...) are very different form things 
    like mkstemp().  The mkstemp() discussion below is a security discussion.
    vsprintf(NULL, ...), fclose(NULL), and others of that ilk are feature
    enhancement hacks.   The two are very different beasts and you just
    can't compare one against the other as you appear to be doing.

					-Matt

:-- 
:Dag-Erling Smørgrav - dag-erli@ifi.uio.no
:
:

    Matthew Dillon  Engineering, HiWay Technologies, Inc. & BEST Internet 
                    Communications & God knows what else.
    <dillon@backplane.com> (Please include original email in any response)    

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199810221526.IAA13589>