Re: problem with inline functions in gsweb and clang

[David Chisnall]

On 27 May 2013, at 18:18, Ivan Vučica <ivucica@gmail.com> wrote:

> Somewhat off topic: I really like the following error; it's extremely 
> professional and mature. Where is it coming from?
> 
> /usr/local/lib/libgcrypt.so.18.0: warning: stpcpy() is dangerous GNU crap; 
> don't use it

It's a linker error that is triggered by the presence of an attribute on a 
function.  The text is a reference to Ulrich Drepper's refusal to accept 
patches to implement the strl* functions in glibc because they were 
'inefficient BSD crap'.  

It is 'dangerous', because it will NULL-terminate the string in some cases, but 
not others.  This means that you must always check the lengths of both strings 
before calling it, at which point you may as well use memcpy, which will be 
faster.  

Note, however, that the GNU man page explicitly claims not to have invented 
this function, and it is now part of POSIX2008 (Austin has a habit of 
standardising bad ideas if two or more libcs have implemented them), so the 
'GNU' in the warning is misleading.  

David

-- Sent from my brain