MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <e12847f2-4cea-c3e8-84c3-e98b92553f8e@dereferenced.org> <20210407114719.qcup2wefxby523ez@wolfsden.cz>
In-Reply-To: <20210407114719.qcup2wefxby523ez@wolfsden.cz>
From: Led <ledest@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 18:33:10 +0300
Message-ID: <CAAO3vZ-RV=8J=cJhZOrT_btcaYRxzx+QxFOF5ah5TO_mGwE8XQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [3.15] System change proposal: Use netbsd-curses instead of GNU ncurses
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

IMHO It looks like a plan to "fix" the unbroken things.

=D1=81=D1=80, 7 =D0=BA=D0=B2=D1=96=D1=82. 2021 =D0=BE 14:50 Wolf <wolf@wolf=
sden.cz> =D0=BF=D0=B8=D1=88=D0=B5:
>
> Hello,
>
> On 2021-04-06 12:17:33 -0600, Ariadne Conill wrote:
> > * Both libraries implement the POSIX curses API.
> >
> > This means, 99% of applications won't need patching and should be basic=
ally
> > compatible.
>
> (Incomplete) list of differences at [0] seems to contain only
> hard-to-debug, easy-to-miss type of things.
>
> > new_item
>
> This will just introduce memory bloat since every string in items will
> now be present twice.
>
> > post_menu
>
> Will just not work (and return error no one will likely check) instead
> of truncating (which might be fine for most software).
>
> > getnstr
>
> Not sure what the implications here are, but sounds like buffer
> overflow.
>
> All these things by themselves are fairly reasonable, however if
> software assumes ncurses behaviour, I'm afraid they will be hard to
> notice since none of them should lead to hard crash, but instead just to
> worse/suboptimal behavior.
>
> Is there a plan to go over whole aports to make sure none of the
> programs uses these functions the wrong way for openbsd-curses? What
> about new packages? I'm not sure it is possible to have some kind of
> linter for this.
>
> W.
>
> [0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/curses_in_netbsd/
>
> --
> There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
> cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.



--=20
Led.