Re: Buffer overflows

From: René Scharfe <rene.scharfe@lsrfire.ath.cx>
Date: Sep 2, 2007, 17:17 UTC
Message-ID: <46DAF039.2000208@lsrfire.ath.cx>
In-Reply-To: <200709021542.31100.johan@herland.net>

Johan Herland schrieb:

Show 17 quoted lines

> So why does the discussion end there? Lukas proposed an interesting 
> alternative in "The Better String Library" ( 
> http://bstring.sourceforge.net/ ). Why has there been lots of bashing on 
> Timo's efforts, but no critique of bstring? I'd be very keen to know what 
> the git developers think of it. AFAICS, it seems to fulfill at least _some_ 
> of the problems people find in Timo's patches. Specifically, it claims:
> 
> - High performance (better than the C string library)
> - Simple usage
> 
> I'd also say it's probably more widely used than Timo's patches.
> 
> 
> If the only response to Timo's highlighting of string manipulation problems 
> in git, is for us to flame his patches and leave it at that, then I have no 
> choice but to agree with him in that security does not seem to matter to 
> us.

Well, a patch (8dabdfcc) from Alex Riesen has made it into 1.5.3 which fixes some of the problems. That's a start.

And don't forget that we have our very own string library, viz. strbuf.c, which could see more use.

That said, I agree that bstring looks well thought out. It's also quite large (lots of functions, lots of code where a bug might lurk). Hmm.

Now if only someone could demonstrate the advantages of using bstring in git by posting a nice patch.. :-P

René