Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 00:34:52 +0100
From: viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk
To: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>,
       Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       bfennema@falcon.csc.calpoly.edu
Subject: Re: Fix UDF-FS potentially dereferencing null
Message-ID: <20040416233452.GK24997@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk>
References: <20040416214104.GT20937@redhat.com> <20040416220014.GI24997@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk> <40806880.1030007@pobox.com> <20040416231823.GZ20937@redhat.com>
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On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 12:18:23AM +0100, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 07:13:04PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>  > >Check in question is a BS - it never gets NULL passed as dir.
>  > 
>  > Yes, it looks like a lot of these NULL checks caught can be fixed simply 
>  > by removing bogus and/or redundant checks.
> 
> And there's a *lot* of them. Those half dozen or so patches earlier were
> results of just a quick random skim of the list the coverity folks came up with.
> 
> It'll take a lot of effort to 'fix' them all, and given the non-severity
> of a lot of them, I'm not convinced it's worth the effort.

We really ought to kill just-in-case checks like that - they only obfuscate
the code _and_ hide bugs.  The thing we must *not* do is "closing" the
items in that list by adding meaningless precautions of that sort.
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