strncmp usage in ipfw

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 03:08:21PM -0800, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> the plan is fine with me.
> i wonder if one couldn't temporarily replace strncmp with a wrapper that
> does behave as strncmp, but issues a warning in those cases where
> the results would be ambiguous.
> At least in this way one could tell if there is a problem
> anywhere before removing it.

That would be easy enough.  We could just ship 6.x that way and switch
to only using explicit abbreviations in 7.x giving us a nice deprecation
schedule without too much maintenance hassle.

-- Brooks

> On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 01:53:19PM -0800, Brooks Davis wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 04:19:32AM -0800, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> > > i believe the original, old ipfw code used strncmp() to allow for
> > > abbreviations. When i rewrote ipfw2 i did not feel like removing
> > > the feature for fear of introducing backward compatibility problems
> > > with existing files. However I agree that this introduces a
> > > maintainability nightmare and i believe we should move to strcmp(),
> > > especially given that with ipfw2 new option names are coming out
> > > quite frequently.
> > 
> > OK, that makes sense.
> > 
> > I'd like to propose the following plan:
> > 
> >  - Disallow new strncmp instances in all branches.
> > 
> >  - remove strncmp usage in HEAD with the intention of explicitly adding
> >    back needed abbreviations when those abbreviations are both:
> >     - sane (no single letter appreviations, reasionable edit distance
> >       from other options, either obvious shorthand or reasionbly mnemonic).
> >     - actually used be someone (this is key, espeicaly since there are
> >       hundreds of possiable values and this isn't a documented
> >       feature as far as I can tell.)
> > 
> > If need be we could implement a more complex stratigy for deprecation
> > where we use a new matching function and warn about short matches, but
> > I'm not sure that's necessicary.
> > 
> > -- Brooks
> 
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