Re: RFC: add a string-desc module

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> I think this is a useful contribution,

Thanks.

> however I see two deal-breakers
> for having it in gnulib -- both related to use in libraries.  I think
> string helpers types/functions like this is useful not only in
> applications but also in libraries.  Thus:
> 
>  1) License - there really isn't much novelty here, how about making
>  this public domain or LGPLv2+?

Not public domain — it does not protect the user from patent claims.

Not MIT license — I don't intend to make gifts to proprietary software
vendors. It's bad enough that some companies ignore the requirements
of the GPL. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rgsXq2e7Ck>

I've put the core module under LGPLv3+.

If you want it under LGPLv2+, it would be OK for my part, but we would
have to relax the 'memrchr' module to LGPLv2+ first.

>  2) Applicability to use in a library - using x*alloc and abort is
>  frowned upon in libraries.  Libraries should return error codes on
>  expected errors (and I argue memory allocation failure is an expected
>  error), and not cause application exits.

Done by separating library-safe memory allocations and checked memory
allocations into separate modules.

> One way to resolve 2) is to have two variants of this functionality: one
> low-level variant that doesn't abort the application on errors, and one
> high-level variant that behaves like your implementation.  The
> high-level variant could depend on the low-level variant, but that's not
> essential.

Yes, that's how I did it, for the most part. I couldn't do this so easily
for the string_desc_concat function, though, due to varargs.

Bruno