That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible

Posted May 21, 2009 21:19 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible by liljencrantz
Parent article: EGLIBC: Not a fork, but a glibc distribution

Your timeline is trivially false from inspection of the source, simply
because strfry() and memfrob() were implemented over a decade *before*
NPTL, in the very early days of glibc, not by some random nobody but by
Roland McGrath, the original author of glibc and still its co-maintainer.

It was implemented at the same time as a heap of K&R-related horrors and a
fix to strstr(): I suspect Roland was very bored after that and wanted to
do something fun to flush his brain out. Hence the glorious uselessness
that is strfry() and memfrob(). Their negative consequence is principally
that they sort lexicographically next to heavily used functions, and there
is no attempt to sort objects in libc.so according to frequency of use: so
these two functions reside permanently in memory on most Linux systems,
dragged in because the other str*() and mem*() functions are next to them
and in essentially continuous use.

That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible

Posted May 22, 2009 10:59 UTC (Fri) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link] (1 responses)

I specifically stated that the chain of events was unlikely to be chronological. :)

I didn't know it was McGrath that implemented them, but it doesn't change the fact that Drepper is (IMO) well within his right to say that he does not wish to waste his time by partaking in the joke, and when people again and again try to force him to do so, he is well within his right be grumpy.

The guys that keep pushing the patch are like some nerds I know, who keep making jokes about something very nerdish, e.g. phasers or VAX systems, in a group of people completely indifferent to the subject. Nobody gets the joke, nobody laughs, but they keep pushing the joke, trying to explain why it's funny instead of just dropping it.

That's silly. You can have strlcat() and strlcpy(), yet be compatible

Posted May 23, 2009 9:04 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Er, they're perfectionists. They want strfry(), as long as it's there, to
be as good as it can be. Having a function that's both a joke *and* broken
would be worse yet. Ulrich is a perfectionist too, but a curiously
selective one: he only cares that the parts of glibc that he uses or that
someone's paying him for are perfect. The rest (unusual ports, locales,
POSIX functions he dislikes) can go hang.

Personally I think that's a rather discreditable attitude in a maintainer,
but maybe that's just me.