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Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 12:06:57 +0100
From: Martin Dalecki <dalecki@evision-ventures.com>
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To: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
CC: Tim Jansen <tim@tjansen.de>, Daniel Phillips <phillips@bonn-fries.net>,
        "Jakob =?iso-8859-1?Q?=D8stergaard?=" <jakob@unthought.net>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]
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Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 4 Nov 2001, Tim Jansen wrote:
> 
> > So if only some programs use the 'dot-files' and the other still use the
> > crappy text interface we still have the old problem for scripts, only with a
> > much larger effort.
> 
> Folks, could we please deep-six the "ASCII is tough" mentality?  Idea of
> native-endian data is so broken that it's not even funny.  Exercise:
> try to export such thing over the network.  Another one: try to use
> that in a shell script.  One more: try to do it portably in Perl script.
> 
> It had been tried.  Many times.  It had backfired 100 times out 100.
> We have the same idiocy to thank for fun trying to move a disk with UFS
> volume from Solaris sparc to Solaris x86.  We have the same idiocy to
> thank for a lot of ugliness in X.
> 
> At the very least, use canonical bytesex and field sizes.  Anything less
> is just begging for trouble.  And in case of procfs or its equivalents,
> _use_ the_ _damn_ _ASCII_ _representations_.  scanf(3) is there for
> purpose.

And the purpose of scanf in system level applications is to introduce
nice
opportunities for buffer overruns and string formatting bugs.
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