Hello Taylor,
thanks for your interest in HelenOS!
I plan to apply to work on the UDF 1.02 server and
will be reading the provided documentation on it this weekend. I also
plan to patch a few VFS related bugs or enhancements as noted on the
tracker within the next week.
Great! We are looking forward to your contribution.
After reading the
mailing list, it seems like it's better to recode something than use
something that already exists but might not be as good in the eyes of
HelenOS.
We certainly do not want to be dogmatic. If there is some existing code
which has high quality and is suitable for incorporation into HelenOS,
we are not a priori opposed to it.
The trouble is that a lot of legacy code is simply broken in some way or
it comes from a world with totally different design/architecture goals.
This needs to be evaluated on case to case basis.
The situation I ran into was trying to use the "atoi" function
of stdlib from libc. The problem is that it doesn't exist!
Yes, this is a very fitting example indeed. We do not have atoi() in our
libc because the function is just broken (designed in a wrong way). It
does not detect errors, the return value is "int" (thus it is rather
complicated to be sure about the accepted range of integers on different
platforms), etc.
Have a look on the family of str_uint32_t() functions which do not
suffer from such problems.
It does
however exist in the posix stdlib in the project, but none of the other
bdsh apps seem to be using the more complete posix libraries.
The libposix library should be generally used only for porting POSIX
applications from other systems. It is not intended to be used for
native HelenOS applications.
So in this
situation, would it be better to recode atoi into the bdsh app, into
libc
Oh, please no. Just use the HelenOS native counterparts if possible.
In case you totally miss some functionality, you can either implement it
in libc in a POSIX-compliant way or (if the POSIX is broken, stupid or
simply too 1970s :)) try to think about a better and generic solution.
Anyway, I look forward to working more on this project this weekend and
promise to bring more UDF related questions with me then.
OK, do not hesitate to ask.
Best regards
Martin Decky
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