Re: PATCH: safe string copy and concetation

[Chiaki Ishikawa <Chiaki dot Ishikawa at personal-media dot co dot jp>]

X-PMC-CI-e-mail-id: 13401 

For a newly written programs going through debugging,
I think Ultrich Drepper's argument makes sense.

However, on a running server, you may find, to our horror and
surprise, that a necessary daemon or production programs have
a str* related overflow. Ugh.

In such a case, strlcpy and friends can be a valuable tool
for a QUICK SHORTT-TERM BAND-AID.
We can BUY TIME TO FIX THE PROBLEMS at the root cause while
at least the program in question is limping along (not crashing, nor
being abused.).

Real world problems of B-news came to my mind when I looked the exchanges on 
this topic.
(Once the Internet becme very large in a short time, Bnews experienced
internal buffer overflows because the size of buffers allocated for
news propagation paths was not long enough, etc..
I wish I had strlcpy and friends back when this happend.
I tried kludges for about 3 months each time a new problem surfaced
but gave up and switched to INN.)


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