linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/6] lib: string: add function strtolower()

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Date:	Mon, 4 Jul 2016 13:18:18 -0700
From:	Markus Mayer <markus.mayer@...adcom.com>
To:	Rasmus Villemoes <linux@...musvillemoes.dk>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
	Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@...hip.com>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
	dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org, nouveau@...ts.freedesktop.org,
	linux-acpi@...r.kernel.org, devel@...ica.org,
	speakup@...ux-speakup.org, devel@...verdev.osuosl.org,
	linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org, target-devel@...r.kernel.org,
	Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/6] lib: string: add function strtolower()

On 1 July 2016 at 14:08, Rasmus Villemoes <linux@...musvillemoes.dk> wrote:

> A few suggestions:
>
> - Make the function take separate src and dst parameters, making it explicitly
>   allowed to pass the same value (but not other kinds of overlap, of
>   course). That way one can avoid "strcpy(dst, src); strtolower(dst);".
>
> - Drop the NULL check. If someone does "foo->bar = something;
>   strtolower(foo->bar); put foo in a global data structure...", the
>   dereference of foo->bar may happen much later. Doing the NULL deref
>   sooner means it's much easier to find and fix the bug. (Also, other
>   str* and mem* functions don't usually check for NULL).
>
> - While it's true that strcpy and memcpy by definition return dst, that's
>   mostly useless. If you want it to return anything, please make it
>   something that might be used - for example, having stpcpy semantics
>   (returning a pointer to dst's terminating \0) means a caller might avoid
>   a strlen call.
>
> - Maybe do strtoupper while you're at it. Quick grepping didn't find any
>   use for the copy-while-lowercasing, but copy-while-uppercasing can at
>   least be used in drivers/acpi/acpica/nsrepair2.c,
>   drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nvkm/engine/fifo/gk104.c,
>   drivers/power/power_supply_sysfs.c along with a bunch of inplace
>   uppercasing.
>
>
> Rasmus

Thanks for the suggestions to you and Jani. Based on the feedback I
received, I am reworking the series now and will post v2 probably
tomorrow.

Regards,
-Markus