James Carlson wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore writes:
>
>> My leaning is to #1. It seems like we're trying to make bad
>> applications happy, to satisfy what is probably a small minority of
>> developers who feel that such use of NULL should be legal (despite
>> documentation to the contrary) -- and who are unwilling to use a
>> perfectly reasonable workaround, at a potential cost to the greater set
>> of well-behaved applications.
>>
>
> I think what's missing there is that this is (unfortunately) not just
> a minority of developers. The bulk of user-space software looks like
> this these days. People are just plain careless, and either we live
> with it to make those applications "just work," or we suffer random
> GNOME applications dropping core on OpenSolaris and nobody really
> caring because it's "only" OpenSolaris that has this "problem."
>
So, I'm curious, do we have something like a hitlist somewhere of such
ill-behaved applications? (And, correspondingly, a list of those
applications or libraries whose maintainers have declared that they are
not interested in fixing this behavior?)
My fear is that by masking coding problems like this, we wind up with
worse problems, which are harder to debug, later, and that we wind up
"encouraging" sloppy coding practice rather than working with developers
to fix the busted behavior.
Is the next step really to start checking for null arguments to other
string functions? What about null pointers passed to other library
routines, such as free(), qsort(), bsearch()?
-- Garrett
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