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Re: glibc segfault on "special" long double values is _ok_!?




It may well be that the current glibc behavior is not prohibited by
any standard, but I think that "quality of implementation" concerns
(not to mention a desire for robustness and security) would dictate a
more manageable result.

Your right, it would seem that if its possible to make a fix that avoids a crash, even when that crash is caused by incorrect behavior in the application, its the right thing to do. I do it all the time in our application in response to user errors, hardware errors, other library programming errors. Frankly, in our application any crash is unacceptable. Apparently that level of quality isn't a requirement for glibc. I understand that its impossible to close all the holes but when its an easy fix, I simply don't understand why the library cannot do it instead of having every application vendor have to provide wrappers around glibc functions to assure that error conditions that should be caught by the library are caught and handled before calling the library. The current stance just makes glibc appear brittle.




From monitoring this mailing list for a while it appears apparent that certain people pride themselves in rejecting any patch which improves the robustness of glibc.


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