From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:37:05 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/7] trace2: stop allowing die()
Message-ID: <77c35daa-1b28-4248-a203-3fd9c23de76a@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <pull.2178.v3.git.1788197143.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

On 8/31/2026 1:25 PM, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote: 
> This starts with a new banned-die.h header file at the root of the repo and
> including it from all trace2 API *.c files. It starts empty, but the later
> patches will add one method at a time:
> 
>  * xsnprintf() : This is the original patch, but made more complete by
>    adding the method to banned-die.h.
>  * xstrdup()
>  * ALLOC_ARRAY()
>  * xstrfmt()
>  * ALLOC_GROW()
>  * xcalloc()
> 
> During each patch, the goal was to have the trace2 logic be "as correct as
> possible" when an allocation failure occurs. This may mean that we have
> incomplete messages or dropped trace messages.
This topic has sat idle for a while, in part because the protections
attempted by this approach are incomplete and thus less exciting than
I had hoped. My RFC for making strbuf and friends more robust was
similarly unsatisfying [1] but there are some interesting ideas as to
how this can be done differently.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/0f466dc6-f9c5-48ee-bb94-f3e8a951ee5d@gmail.com/

Thanks,
-Stolee