Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v6 08/29] libqtest: Let socket_send() compute length

[Markus Armbruster]

Thomas Huth <address@hidden> writes:

> On 01.09.2017 20:03, Eric Blake wrote:
>> Rather than make multiple callers call strlen(), it's easier if
>> socket_send() itself can compute a length via strlen() if none
>> was provided (caller passes -1).  Callers that can get at the
>> length more efficiently are left that way.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
>> ---
>>  tests/libqtest.c | 10 ++++++----
>>  1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> I have to say that I don't like this idea very much. socket_send()
> should IMHO not know about the type of the data that should be sent,
> i.e. it should not assume that the content is a zero-terminated string.

I agree.

> This also could lead to some hard to detect bugs later in case somebody
> is calling the function like this:
>
>   size = someotherfunction();
>   socket_send(fd, buf, size);
>
> ... and the someotherfunction() returned a negative error code instead
> of a correct size.
>
> So I'd like to suggest to simply drop this patch.

A separate wrapper function for sending zero-terminated strings would be
fine with me.