unofficial mirror of bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org 
 help / color / mirror / code / Atom feed
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>
Cc: 32189@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#32189: 27.0.50; GCC 7 warning due to -Wformat-truncation=2
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 16:29:37 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <83in5b2w1q.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAArVCkRmw4oF3a=UAp1J+CLSoxtdKpx=2KFS032J11nKOzjz+w@mail.gmail.com> (message from Philipp Stephani on Thu, 19 Jul 2018 08:21:54 +0200)

> From: Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 08:21:54 +0200
> Cc: Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>, 32189@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
>  Do we really need to use -Wformat-truncation?  Is it a useful warning
>  switch?  The above sounds like useless noise, because the code
>  explicitly _asks_ for truncation.  What do people think about this?
> 
> The typical use case for snprintf is to make sure that the output never gets truncated, so disabling
> -Wformat-truncation would be harmful in most cases.

That might be typical for your uses, but it doesn't mean it is
universally so.  It definitely isn't true for my uses: I use snprintf
to be sure a fixed buffer won't be overrun due to some programming
mistake.  And that is exactly what is going on in that function,
because the maximum expected values of the variables are known in
advance, and the buffer is large enough to accommodate them.

> With truncation, the code will result in nonsensical output if the input value was too large, e.g. 123.4 hours
> would result in "12" if the buffer size were 3.

Since truncation should never happen, except when there's some bug,
this is not really interesting.

> Rather than relying on truncation, the code should probably just use a buffer that's large enough, or use %g
> instead of %f. 

If we need to jump through hoops to stop useless noise about perfectly
valid code, we shouldn't have this warning in the first place.





  reply	other threads:[~2018-07-19 13:29 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2018-07-17 19:26 bug#32189: 27.0.50; GCC 7 warning due to -Wformat-truncation=2 Ken Brown
2018-07-18 15:09 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-18 19:42   ` Ken Brown
2018-07-19  2:38     ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-19  6:10     ` Philipp Stephani
2018-07-19 12:49       ` Ken Brown
2018-07-19 13:25       ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-19  6:21   ` Philipp Stephani
2018-07-19 13:29     ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2018-07-19 13:56       ` Ken Brown
2018-07-19 14:17         ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-19 23:19           ` Paul Eggert
2018-07-20  6:56             ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-20 13:49               ` Ken Brown
2018-07-20 14:17                 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-20 14:27                   ` Ken Brown
2018-07-20 14:37                     ` Paul Eggert
2018-07-20 14:51                       ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-07-20 19:34                       ` Ken Brown
2018-07-20 21:03                         ` Paul Eggert

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=83in5b2w1q.fsf@gnu.org \
    --to=eliz@gnu.org \
    --cc=32189@debbugs.gnu.org \
    --cc=p.stephani2@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox

	https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).