[U-Boot] [PATCH 2/3] Fix a few gcc warnings.

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Scott Wood,

In message <20110425144518.5a37bd4c at schlenkerla.am.freescale.net> you wrote:
>
> Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo.org> wrote:
...
> > that wasnt what i was saying.  my point is simply that changing
> > printf(foo); to printf("%s", foo); simply to satisfy a gcc warning is
> > wrong and unnecessarily bloats the compiled code.
> 
> My point was that the warning should stay, until such a time as it's
> complaining about something that we actually want to do -- I've yet to see
> an example cited so far that didn't have an easy non-"bloating" fix.

I disagree. "printf(foo);" may be suboptimal but there are cases
where I do not want to see a warning about this. Consider for example
common/main.c:

 115 #  ifdef CONFIG_AUTOBOOT_PROMPT
 116         printf(CONFIG_AUTOBOOT_PROMPT);
 117 #  endif

Here we provide a way for a user-defined autoboot prompt message. Some
users may just want to provide a plain string - what's wrong with
that?  [Yes, there are other ways to implement this, but why make it
more complicated than necessary?]

> Even in a context such as U-Boot, IMHO format-string functions shouldn't be
> used in such a way -- it may not be a security issue, but it's a potential
> readability/maintainability issue when it may not be obvious from the other
> context where the string is defined, that any embedded percent characters
> must be doubled.  It's a different situation from where a string literal is
> defined right in the context of the format-string function.

Again, I disagree.


Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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