rcs blows up on suns

[Larry West]

In article <961 at sdcsla.UUCP> west at sdcsla.UUCP (Larry West) writes:
>>> RCS blows up on Suns in part because Suns insist that a null pointer be a
>>> pointer to a null string; zero pointers won't do.
>>
>>Is this for real?  Does any other system adopt this perverse convention?

>I (and others here) have been using RCS on Suns extensively for
>years.   I've never had any problems with it, and I don't think
>anyone else has had anything major go wrong.   So I doubt that
>the bad RCS code was that distributed by SMI.

I was wrong here -- Diana L. Syriac (genrad!panda!dls) sent me
an example command sequence that dumps core on Suns:
	rcs -l foo.c
	rcs -u foo.c

This is indeed a null-pointer problem.   The RCS code is clearly
incorrect here, in that it assumes a null pointer is okay for
"strcmp" or "strcpy".

My apologies to Dale Nielsen (genrad!panda!dpn) for assuming
he was incorrect in his assessment of the problem, simply because
I've never had RCS dump core on me.   Similar apologies to the
net for adding noise to the net.unix group.

As I stated in my original reply, dereferencing zero is always
a bad idea, even though it `works' (returns 0) on Vaxen.   So,
it isn't Sun's fault per se, and I don't think RCS is really
a supported product of Sun Microsystems... (anyone from Sun
care to comment on this?).

Larry
-- 

Larry West				(USA+619-)452-6771
Institute for Cognitive Science
UC San Diego (mailcode C-015)
La Jolla, CA  92093  U.S.A.

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