linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL] strscpy string copy function

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Message-ID: <CA+55aFwHCPnPf_xs6GJu37UBvg_BSiFPH2uQps7qNNFV8Ej-SA@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Sun, 4 Oct 2015 16:55:24 +0100
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@...hip.com>
Cc:	open list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] strscpy string copy function

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 8:43 PM, Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@...hip.com> wrote:
>
> Please pull the following changes for 4.3 from:
>
>   git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cmetcalf/linux-tile.git strscpy

So I finally pulled it. I like the patch, I like the new interface,
but despite that I wasn't really sure if I wanted to pull it in - thus
the long delay of me just seeing this in my list of pending pulls for
almost a month, but never really getting to the point where I decided
I want to commit to it.

I wrote a longish merge message about why - but it boils down to me
hating the mindless trivial conversion patches. Which were not in the
pull request, but I want to make it clear to everybody that I have
absolutely zero interest in seeing such patches. I want to encourage
judicious use of strscpy() in new code, or in code that gets modified
because it is buggy or is updated for other reasons (and thus thought
about and tested), but I am *not* going to accept patches that do mass
conversions of strlcpy or strncpy to the new interface.

So just pulling the support seemed safe since ghere are no actual
*users* of this yet. So it's purely preparatory for future patches, so
it still made sense just before I'm doing an -rc4. Of course, I hope I
won't regret that "seems safe", since I'm sure the newly exposed
word-at-a-time things may well break architectures that I am not
test-compiling (ie all of them except x86-64), but it looked fine and
any breakage should be trivial.

Side note: I'm not entirely convinced about the "__must_check". There
are real cases where you don't really care whether you get a full
string or not, and strncpy() or strlcpy() may be unacceptable due to
their respective problems. But let's see once we start getting real
users who really thought about what they want.

                Linus
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