Re: [gentoo-dev] Fwd: [gentoo-dev-announce] Call for items for September 13 council meeting

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com>]

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On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:01:56 +0200
Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:55:08 +0100
> Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:35:21 +0200
> > Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > Could you point me to at least a single program not supporting
> > > dots in useflags? My quick check shows that all PMs handle them
> > > well, quse and euse as well.
> > 
> > Hrm, it's rather disappointing that they're accepted everywhere.
> > That really shouldn't happen... My excuse for Paludis is that I
> > never quite got around to passing in additional flags to validation
> > of names, and dots are legal in exheres-0, so they're currently
> > accepted everywhere.
> 
> And may I remind you that lately you deliberately changed PMS for all
> EAPIs to satisfy invalid paludis behavior? And you knew that it caused
> actual breakages.

Huh? Not sure what you're on about here. Accepting invalid input is in
the "annoying because it leads to broken code appearing to work"
category, which is very different from "doing the wrong thing for valid
code". PMS by and large doesn't mandate validation of input (since
Portage doesn't do it at all). Think of it as being like C, where
dereferencing an invalid pointer might still work (so it's an error
for a program to do it, but not an error for a compiler to allow such
an operation to succeed), as opposed to languages like Java that require
that all memory accesses be checked.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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