Re: Why the asprintf patch is still breaking the buildfarm

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 11:00:42AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Yeah. As a separate matter, it might be useful to revise stringinfo.c
> and the asprintf code so that *if* the returned value is larger than the
> given buffer size, we use it as a guide to resizing, avoiding the possible
> need to loop multiple times to make the buffer large enough. And we could
> also improve our own implementation of snprintf to follow the C99 spec.
>
> The point here is that we still need to cope with pre-C99 implementations
> that might return -1 or the given buffer size on overflow. The NetBSD
> implementation doesn't do that, which is reasonable in their context, but
> not workable for us.

I would vote for choosing the standard we want vsnprintf() to follow (probably
C99) and substituting a conforming implementation wherever "configure" detects
that libc does not conform. We'll be shipping some replacement vsnprintf() in
any case; we may as well use it to insulate the rest of our code from
less-preferred variants.

--
Noah Misch
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com