Date: Sat, 23 Sep 95 18:36:54 EDT From: jleppek@suw2k.ess.harris.com (James Leppek) To: freebsd-current@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: runtime warnings, opinion warning Message-ID: <9509232236.AA07462@borg.ess.harris.com>
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This is the reason to upset users or break programs!! The only person that gets annoyed is the user or support person who must field all the queries. Since when did fbsd become a religion where you conform or are damned for all time? This position is clearly in the "advocacy" or personal pet peeve catagory that I always find amusing. I think this type of attitude is OK if you are talking about a small group of developers working on an OS, doing their own ports, etc. I can change things in a few minutes, but if I had a hundred users I would not be happy because they would be coming to me saying its broken. (to most users unsafe == broken) As the number of fbsd sites grow and commercial acceptance appears the basis for this decision does not make sense. Consider the many gnu/freeware apps that exist, would each support group have to track all these releases so that they can change them to cater to fbsd whims? I would not get a "this program is unsafe" message from sun/sg/dec/hp so what does that say to the person running a program on fbsd? If we continued with this thought then shouldn't gcc error if it detects that you have included malloc.h?? How about sprintf or strcpy, or any function that can blow a buffer? As fbsd grows these arbitrary, inconsistencies must be weeded out. The gets man page says don't use it, good place to mention it :-) Jim Leppek (stepping down from his podium :-) ) > From owner-freebsd-current@freefall.freebsd.org Sat Sep 23 17:45:34 1995 > From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> > Subject: Re: runtime warnings > To: jleppek@suw2k.ess.harris.com (James Leppek) > Date: Sat, 23 Sep 1995 23:45:34 +0200 (MET DST) > Cc: freebsd-current@freefall.freebsd.org > Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) > X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 > X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset=ISO-8859-1> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org > > As James Leppek wrote: > > > > having runtime warnings for things like gets. Compile time warnings > > I can understand, but runtime??? I give someone the latest gnuchess > > and everytime they start it, up pops this warning about gets being > > unsafe. To most folks that means "don't run this program, it's broken". > > It has been discussed before. The only way to convince people > replacing dangerous functions (like gets()) is to annoy them. If > you don't have the source, bug the author... > > -- > cheers, J"org > > joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ > Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-) >
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