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Date:      Wed, 22 Sep 2004 07:37:20 +0900
From:      JINMEI Tatuya / =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCP0BMQEMjOkgbKEI=?= <jinmei@isl.rdc.toshiba.co.jp>
To:        Thomas Quinot <thomas@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Thomas Quinot <thomas@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: freeaddrinfo(NULL)
Message-ID:  <y7vd60fgsf3.wl@ocean.jinmei.org>
In-Reply-To: <20040921213233.GA84392@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org>
References:  <20040921123016.GA41677@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org> <y7visa7h2ki.wl@ocean.jinmei.org> <20040921190717.GG84228@lucky.net> <y7vfz5bgzda.wl@ocean.jinmei.org> <20040921213233.GA84392@melusine.cuivre.fr.eu.org>

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>>>>> On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 23:32:33 +0200, 
>>>>> Thomas Quinot <thomas@FreeBSD.ORG> said:

[...snip]

It seems that all these points simply show this is a controversial
issue.  I was not convinced with the argument for the no-op approach,
and still believe segfaulting is better.  But at the same time I seem
to have failed to convince others who believe in no-op.  So I won't
make further comments on those.  (If you feel this is unfair, please
raise the points again.)

One last comment about consistency:

>> This statement is too short to tell if it's valid, but I believe
>> Segfaulting on freeaddrinfo(NULL) can make something safer for the
>> reason I described above.  That is, catching a bug earlier *can*
>> make a safer result.

> In some conditions. But we have to take into account the fact that other
> systems do behave differently with a NULL pointer in freeaddrinfo (yes,
> I am specicly thinking of Linux and Windows), and we may also want to
> take *that* into account and find out how we can offer a consistent
> interface to programmers. I also believe that it would be friendlier to
> programmers to offer a behaviour more similar to free(3).

Note also that other *BSDs and Solaris use the "segfault" logic.  The
freeaddrinfo implementation in the "libbind" library as a part of the
ISC BIND package, which many UNIX-like OS vendors adopt (perhaps with
vendor-specific modifications though), also segfaults against a NULL
argument.

So, although consistency might in general be a good thing, the real
world's examples show we just have variations.

					JINMEI, Tatuya
					Communication Platform Lab.
					Corporate R&D Center, Toshiba Corp.
					jinmei@isl.rdc.toshiba.co.jp



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