strncmp usage in ipfw

[Luigi Rizzo]

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.

	cheers
	luigi

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