[PATCH V2 2/8] string: fix strncmp function

[Jason Cooper]

Daniel,

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 01:23:26PM +0100, Daniel Mack wrote:
> On 12/18/2013 01:15 PM, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 01:09:05PM +0100, Piotr Wilczek wrote:
> >> Now function returns the number of characters that differ in the
> >> compared strings.
> > 
> > I think this is a mistake.  You're defining a standard C function in
> > a non-standard way.  For strcmp() and strncmp(), the C standard
> > requires:
> > 
> > RETURN VALUE
> >        The strcmp() and strncmp() functions return an integer less than, equal
> >        to, or greater than zero if s1 (or the first n bytes thereof) is found,
> >        respectively, to be less than, to match, or be greater than s2.
> > 
> > If you implement something different to that, don't call it strcmp() or
> > strncmp() but something else, because you're not providing the correct
> > functionality, and that will just confuse people and lead to bugs.
> 
> True.
> 
> > For instance, can you be sure that there aren't any uses of strncmp()
> > which already test for less-than-zero etc?
> 
> In this case, yes. The code as it stands is very small, and users only
> check for the return value of these functions to be 0.
> 
> But I wonder whether that patch is needed at all. At least the rest of
> this series does not even seem to introduce new call sites of strcmp()
> or strncmp() ...

Go ahead and drop this one.  I'll do a patch to fix this and remove
those heinous parentheses.  :)

thx,

Jason.