Re: NULL

[John Spencer <maillist-musl@barfooze.de>]

On 01/09/2013 02:09 PM, croco@openwall.com wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 12:02:29PM +0100, John Spencer wrote:
>
>> so for me, there are 3 options how to deal with issue in the future:
>> 2) change musl so it is compatible with those apps. this would mean:
>
>> this change is the easiest solution: any problem will be magically fixed.
> [...]
> However, sometimes the practice forces us to do wrong things just because
> we have no time or resources to do what is the right, and it looks like
> this is exactly the case.  So perhaps the "option 2" will finally be
> choosen, despite we don't like it.  However, I'd suggest at least to let
> the people know this is a WORKAROUND for the bugs THEY introduce: make this
> hack disabled by default, enabled by a compile-time option, and issue a
> warning which points them to this discussion or something similar.

as of now, musl only supports a single configuration.
having 2 different versions of musl in the wild, one that works with 
their apps and another one that does not, is definitely not desirable

> Something like "Okay, if your program doesn't work without this workaround,
> then you can use the workaround, but you'd better fix your program".  This
> will not do much influence while musl is not so popular, but I hope it will
> become popular one day (I really do... let's give the damn world a chance),
> and then the people will have something to think about.

here we have the typical chicken-and-egg problem: as long as 
applications compiled with musl just crash, while they work perfectly 
well with glibc, i think most contributors will become discouraged soon 
and continue using what they're familiar with.