Another ARC gone wild thread? Can we keep the lessons of the past
months in mind?

I read the materials and there are no exported interface changes, no
imported interface changes and not even any documentation changes.

Only an implementation change to something formally defined as
undefined, so while your code reviewers should have something to say
if the implementation chooses to, say, reboot the system, code reviews
are not in scope for ARC.

So there's actually nothing for ARC to review here.. why file this case?
My vote is you close it approved automatic and go fix the bug already.






Everything below is just me adding to the noise, so ignore for "this
case" purposes.

James Carlson wrote:
>
> An application that's incautious with NULL can't possibly just make
> that mistake with printf alone, can it?

They're not being incautious with NULLs, they (C developers) do it
because printf is known and documented to handle it.

Oh, not on OpenSolaris?  Too bad for us, nobody cares. A great way to
make people avoid adopting OpenSolaris is to make sure the apps they
run succesfully everywhere else crash only on OpenSolaris.

GNU printf is documented to print '(null)', so no big surprise
developers rely on documented behavior.

  "If you accidentally pass a null pointer as the argument for a `%s'
  conversion, the GNU library prints it as `(null)'. We think this is
  more useful than crashing."

http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libc/Other-Output-Conversions.html

(The text goes on to say "But it's not good practice to pass a null
argument intentionally" but in true human/developer nature, people
don't pay attention that that. Once the behavior has been promised and
implemented, people will use it.)



Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>
> 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()?

I didn't see Darren propose that so "not this case". But if you'd like
to go research all those functions to see if there are some other
areas where there is a serious disconnect between the defacto industry
standards and the OpenSolaris implementation, hurting OpenSolaris
adoption, it would be useful info to share later.


-- 
Jyri J. Virkki - jyri.virkki at sun.com - Sun Microsystems

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