On 11/8/23 14:11, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
I just don't think we need, as GNU or Linux projects, to be restricted to the decisions of ISO. We can realize that certain functions are bad, and mark them as deprecated in our scope.
There's enough use of strncpy for the intended use (smallish fixed size character arrays that are null padded, not null terminated) that saying it's deprecated would likely cause more trouble than it's worth. It's not just utmp and tar; it's also socket programming (sun_path) and I'm sure other stuff.
Were we designing the C library from scratch I'd agree with you: in that context, strncpy would clearly be more trouble than it's worth. But now that we're stuck with strncpy we have better things to do than try to deprecate it.
Instead of saying "deprecate" I suggest we say something like "This function is generally a poor choice for processing strings" and point to the longer man page about strings in general. That's what the glibc manual does and it works reasonably well.
