From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:08:47 -0400 > I don't clearly understand your position here, and perhaps that's my > own ignorance, but could you please clarify, with examples, exactly > why the change is not acceptable? My position is that since millions upon millions of Linux systems, in fact every single Linux system, exists right now with the current behavior we are not helping application writers at all by changing behavior now after it's been this way for nearly 20 years. Because if an application writer wants his code to work on systems that actually exist he has to accomodate the non-NULL termination situation if he wants to inspect or print out an AF_UNIX path. Because every system in existence right now allows the non-NULL terminated AF_UNIX paths, therefore it's possible on every system in existence right now. Catch my drift? The very thing the patch claims to help, it doesn't. We install this kernel patch now and then tell application writers that they can just assume all AF_UNIX paths are NULL terminated when they want to print it out, because such code will not actually be guarenteed to work on all deployed Linux machines out there. You cannot just ignore 20 years of precedence and say "oh let's change this in the kernel now, and that way application writers don't have to worry about that lack of NULL termination any more." It simply doesn't work like that. All of this talk about whether applications actually create non-NULL terminated AF_UNIX paths don't even factor into the conversation. So the value proposition for this patch simply does not exist. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
