On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 05:22, Detlev Zundel wrote:
Mike Frysinger wrote:
but the point isnt the impact of this single check. it sets the precedence that every function in u-boot that takes a pointer should start over protecting itself against poorly written code originating elsewhere. now your "few characters" is quite a bit more.
I still stand by what I said that if we have functions that can be called from many places (i.e. "library"-like), then the functions should be conservative in what they expect. Tightly coupled code can be looser in this respect. Maybe our disagreement stems from the fact that you consider this function to be "tightly coupled" and not really library like?
not really. i consider this to be "garbage-in garbage-out". imo, u-boot isnt a C library that should be padded with garbage checking all over. the result only helps broken systems (edge cases) while hindering the rest.
i wouldnt have a problem with adopting an NDEBUG system, or perhaps adding assert()'s to this code. then people can easily opt-out of it all and for the people doing development, can easily turn things on. assert(name != NULL);
the current miiphy system needs to be replaced (this runtime string based approach is crazy), but that's a completely different topic :). -mike