Re: Deprecate freecon and freeconary

[Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2@cornell.edu>]

>> This patch marks freecon and freeconary as deprecated.
>> All uses of freecon() are changed to free().
>> Uses of freeconary() remain within the library, since this is a useful 
>> function.
>>     
>
> Given that freeconary() is a useful helper, should we retain it in the
> non-deprecated API but just convert its argument to char** going
> forward?
>   
It's not in the selinux_* namespace, and it's trivial to rewrite...
I'm not sure we should expose a function which frees an array of strings.
This isn't related to selinux, it's a string utility function.

>> stdlib.h has been included where appropriate.
>> stddef.h has been included where size_t was needed
>> Manpages and comments have been edited appropriately.
>>
>> The next logical patch is to remove security_context_t, and replace it 
>> with char*, although I'm not sure whether that should be done throughout 
>> the library, or just in the API.
>>     
>
> We'll likely need to retain the type definition in the API for
> compatibility with externally maintained code (e.g. SELinux userland
> patches that have migrated into other distributions and in some cases
> into the upstream packages). 
Right, I didn't mean to remove the typedef statement. I was wondering 
whether we should re-write the function prototypes and manpages not to 
mention it.

>> 1. Freecon and freeconary are not in a proper namespace. All such 
>> functions should be deprecated and replaced in general.
>>     
>
> Not sure if this is truly justified for all such functions, e.g.
> getfilecon, setfilecon, setexeccon, etc are basic primitives that could
> easily have been implemented as system calls (and were originally) if
> that had been an option.  The core API (wrappers of kernel APIs) can
> likely be left alone aside from security_context_t -> char* conversion.
>   
...if they're not syscalls anymore, then I don't see why they shouldn't 
follow the naming rules as all other functions. Anyway, I won't send any 
patches to rename things right now - there were reasons other than the 
naming to look at deprecating freecon* and context_*.


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