Re: strtonum(3) from OpenBSD?

[Adam Hoka <adam.hoka%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:54:14 -0400
Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:50:18AM -0500, David Young wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 05:35:04PM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:29:56AM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> > > > Returning an error *string* is so profoundly bogus I have trouble
> > > > imagining that anyone with more than a few weeks' experience programming
> > > > in C doesn't see why.
> > > 
> > > Indeed, but if we change it to a better API it will imediately loose
> > > it's portability value.
> > 
> > Right.
> > 
> > What if we write strtonum(3) in terms of an API that we do like, and
> > indicate in the manual page that strtonum(3) should not be used for new
> > code?
> 
> Sure, we could do that.  We could also cause every string returned by
> strtonum(3) to be "USELESS ERROR STRING -- SEE ERRNO", since the function
> does set errno, and document that our implementation does so.  But I
> still don't see how this justifies adding this bogus interface to libc.
> 
> Thor

And what about implementing something with similar functionality sans the 
mentioned api problems and put it into libutil?

-- 
Adam Hoka <Adam.Hoka%Gmail.com@localhost>
Adam Hoka <ahoka%NetBSD.org@localhost>
Adam Hoka <ahoka%MirBSD.de@localhost>