Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development

Posted Apr 30, 2024 22:27 UTC (Tue) by willy (subscriber, #9762)
In reply to: Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development by atai
Parent article: Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development

A lot of this is familiarity. When an unholy mess of shell, Makefile, sed, awk, perl spits out an error, I have an idea about how to go about diagnosing and even fixing it.

When it's something I don't know like m4, cmake or Bazel, I'm screwed. And honestly when it's something like Bazel which appears to exist Because Google Is Better At Everything Than You Are, I am disinclined to learn.

Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development

Posted May 1, 2024 11:47 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Also there's cmake's propensity for spitting out errors halfway through a complicated setup and then, surprise, going through the other half of the complicated setup before finally dying … with an error message that kindof implies that the last step of the complicated setup has gone wrong.

Funnily enough, that last step often is looking for the precise flavor of the pthread[s] library, which habitually "fails" because the check for the 'wrong' variant prints an error message. A web search for pthreads "breaking" your cmake script yields a heap of confused examples.

Makefiles aren't exactly anti-pattern-free either. You can make them arbitrarily complex, if not NP-complete. Look at the Linux kernel's build system if you need an example.

Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development

Posted May 3, 2024 1:06 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Yes, sometimes you want `message(FATAL_ERROR)` to stop ASAP, other times you want to try and get as many questions in the cache at once to reduce reconfigure cycles when satisfying a project's requests. But as with any tool, starting with the *first* reported error is usually a good place to start.

Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development

Posted May 3, 2024 9:40 UTC (Fri) by mss (subscriber, #138799) [Link]

meson seems to be this decade build system of choice for OSS projects.

cmake was more like year 2010 thing.