Re: [bug-gnulib] Handling null pointers to printf

[Aaron Stone]

On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 10:55 +0100, James Youngman wrote:
> On 5/24/06, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Then the argument about the glibc behaviour and the *BSD libc behaviour is
> > moot: if there's a single platform where it crashes, and if the standard 
> > says
> > that NULL are invalid arguments, gnulib's implementation can crash as well.
> 
> I would go further and say that it _should_ crash.   Otherwise, bugs
> just hang around the place and don't get fixed.

As Bruno noted, the reporter last year was trying to get debug output.
He was bound to be getting null values. I am doing the same thing;
testing for nulls is important, but sometimes I need to "see" them.

When I get a bug report about something not working, like this:
http://www.dbmail.org/mantis/view.php?id=352
It took me < 15 minutes to track down a way upstream function producing
null pointers, entirely without a debugger.

Crashing on null %s args puts gnulib at odds with all other open source
lib's -- glibc, *BSD libc's, so on. People use gnulib to get the gnuish
behavior on other platforms. Being safe about nulls is a gnuish behavior
that many people appreciate.

Thanks,
Aaron