[...] > Developers on Linux and *BSD aren't reading Solaris > man pages. The
So do what I haven't seen anyone suggest yet: submit patches for _their_ man pages, that say what the opengroup man page says, with the addition of the phrase "according to portability standards", where the word "undefined" appears: > If a conversion specification does not match one of the above forms, the > behavior is > undefined. If any argument is not the correct type for the corresponding > conversion > specification, the behavior is undefined. I checked, and the glibc HTML narrative description merely says: > 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. > But it's not good > practice to pass a null argument intentionally. Even according to their own far more readable but far less precise language, such code is "not good practice". > whole reason for this case is for making building and > running existing > softwar that works (regardless of what "we" think of > the quality issue > of passing NULL to printf) on other platforms. [...] Be very glad I have no vote. I respect practical considerations, but as far as I'm concerned, the number of people committing an error never justifies supporting it. It does however justify an admittedly larger effort to (diplomatically, yet) inform and educate. And to submit application patches upstream. Encouraging discrepancies between standards and code to be perpetuated devalues the standards, without which all is chaos. This message posted from opensolaris.org
