On 11/12/2017 02:06 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:

Thanks for mentioning the problem with GCC 8. If the intent of __attribute__((__nonstring__)) is to consistently mark char arrays that are not necessarily null-terminated strings, then lots of data structures in the tzdb code would need to be marked with this attribute. For example, every member of tzfile.h's 'struct tzhead' would have the attribute, because they are all char arrays that might not be null-terminated.

Looking at the proposed glibc patch, it seems its intent is more modest. All it's trying to do is to pacify GCC 8 so that GCC doesn't complain about calls to strncpy and strncat. In that case, a simpler and cleaner fix for tzdb is to stop using strncpy and strncat. (I suspect that the main reason tzdb uses strncpy is that its code is so old that it predates the widespread availability of memcpy.) So I installed the attached patch into tzdb's zic.c and it should be part of the next tzdb release.

Great!

Perhaps you can this idea elsewhere in the rest of the glibc patch too. It would be a lot of work to consistently change glibc to use __attribute__((__nonstring__)) for its documented purpose. If glibc can avoid calling strncpy and strncat, it won't need __NONSTRING;

Replacing strncpy with memcpy works well in some case (such the TZ_MAGIC macro). In other cases the string pointed to by the constant argument is unknown and can be shorter than the size of the destination so in those the replacement would need to be more involved. I tried to make only minimal changes to suppress the new warning to avoid excessive churn. I also didn't want to remove the originally intended and correct uses of strncpy (to completely fill a buffer). I have another GCC enhancement that I plan to submit this week that points out uses of these non-string arrays with common string functions like strlen. With it, annotating more of the non-string arrays with the attribute to help detect their accidental misuses might be preferable to using memcpy. I'll leave that decision to the Glibc folks here. if not,

then I suggest changing this:

/* Describes a char array that is not necessarily a NUL-terminated string. */ # define __NONSTRING __attribute__ ((__nonstring__))

to something more like this:

/* Describes a char array whose address can safely be passed as the first argument to strncpy and strncat, as the char array is not necessarily a NUL-terminated string. */ # define __NONSTRING __attribute__ ((__nonstring__))

in sys/cdefs.h, so that the more-modest goal of the patch is clearer to the reader.

I'll CC: this to tz@iana.org as a heads-up there.

That would make sense to me as well I'll wait to submit an updated patch until this and Joseph's style question have been settled. Thanks Martin