Re: Proposed addition of strcodecs(3) library - review requested

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 06:40:18PM +0200, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 12:28:27PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 03:32:55AM +0200, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> > >
> > > This is a request for peer review for the addition of a new library,
> > > strcodecs(3), to the repository.  It adds a consistent framework for a
> > > lot of the string and data transformations we already have, and a lot
> > > more new ones.
> > 
> > Why "str"?  Many of the included codecs appear to operate just fine on
> > arbitrary binary data.
> 
> No real reason, that was just the name I started out with and it
> stuck in my mind and version control tree.

Another very general comment: Christos suggested to me long ago that
the right way to deal with the profusion of things like this in our
tree was to hook the underlying transform functions up to stdio via
funopen().  This is a little easier and more general now because the
current XPG draft includes Linux' fmemopen().

In general -- and I'm not saying "redo your work, the abstraction is bad",
I'm asking you your opinion since you've actually done the work to build
an abstraction around this once, and I haven't! -- what do you think of
that idea?