> While you are correct that the library has no way of knowing which of the
> two choices it should use, our common practice for printf() has been to
> not core dump.  We have had that behavior since 4.4BSD, i.e. longer than
> there has been a NetBSD. Thus BSD developers decided that not core dumping 
> was the better choice overall.
> 
> You are the one who is championing making printf() and puts() and friends
> core dump when passed NULL. That's changing behavior for printf(). Thus I 
> believe you should be explaining to us how this will make our programs 
> better, rather than telling us to change our code.

i think you are missing the context.  my reply was about puts.
i didn't propose to change the historical behaviour of printf.
it's way too late to change. :(

> I agree we should not make system libraries, by default, perform a lot of 
> extra input validation. I believe that _DIAGASSERT is fine for them. 
> However I believe that printf() for the '%s' format and puts() are 
> different. I believe we should retain the printf "(null)" behavior and, 
> especially in light of the gcc optimization, we should extend the behavior 
> to puts(). And that's it. I believe this as I see printf("%s") being used 
> in error-case-logging code in programs, and I feel it is much simpler to 
> let "%s" deal with NULL than to make EVERY caller be defensive.

if you follow gcc (ie. honor compiler's right to do
this kind of optimization), you can't use non-standard extensions anyway.

if you don't follow gcc (ie. disable the optimization),
you don't need to extend the extension to puts.

in either way, i don't see any good reason to propagate
the extention to puts.

YAMAMOTO Takashi