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Re: Wish for 2002 ...


On Sat, 2002-01-12 at 00:24, Felix von Leitner wrote:

> Now, if you add strl* to glibc (and publicize it enough), people will
> start using it and their code will stop working on previous versions of
> Linux and commercial Unices.  So that would do a great deal of damage to
> the world.  More non-standards-compliant unportable software will
> emerge.  And all because one Thomas Bushnell had too much time on his
> hands.

oh please. strlcat in glibc won't be the death of portable software. It
would however be one major platform where we don't need to include it in
libopenbsd-compat. 

Having it in glibc would also encourage new software to use it. The
price of having to include a replacement implementation (which OpenBSD
libc provides on on very reasonable terms) is minimal. Getting
developers of new software to user safer programming constructs is
priceless. 

Linux and the BSD's inclusion of a /dev/random is a good precedent here.
The interface is so useful and so amenable to more secure programming* 
that the commercial Unices are starting to copy it - I am told Sun will
be shipping a /dev/random equivalent in the next release of Solaris.

-d

* how many "crypto" programs have you seen that seed using gettimeofday,
getpid or (gasp) srand?



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