Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] column: disallow negative padding

["Kristoffer Haugsbakk" <code@khaugsbakk.name>]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2024, at 20:27, Rubén Justo wrote:
>     * P.D. *
>
>     Thinking about this in a more general way, I've found that this kind
>     of error has hit us several times:
>
>       - 953aa54e1a (pack-objects: clamp negative window size to 0, 2021-05-01)
>       - 6d52b6a5df (pack-objects: clamp negative depth to 0, 2021-05-01)
>
>     Maybe the source of this error is how easy is to forget that
>     OPT_INTEGER can accept negative values (after all, that's what an
>     integer is).
>
>     There are not many users of OPT_INTEGER, and a quick check gives me
>     the impression (maybe wrong...) that many of them do not expect
>     negative values.
>
>     Maybe we should consider having an OPT_INTEGER that fails if the
>     value supplied is negative.  Ideally, some kind of opt-in machinery
>     could be desirable, I think, for example to include/exclude:
>
>     	- negative values
>     	- "0"  ( may not be a desired value )
>     	- "-1" ( may have some special meaning )
>     	- ...
>
>     I'll leave the idea here, just in case it inspires someone.  Thank
>     you.

Thanks to both for providing a wider perspective on guarding against
such bugs.

And this is an excellent point. I don’t know anything about the opt-args
implementation but it would be great to guard against user-supplied
values through the option parsing library.

Cheers

-- 
Kristoffer Haugsbakk