On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 11:59:01AM -0500, Robbie Harwood wrote: > Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> writes: > > I don't think this patch is needed, because: > > > > 1) The application cannot construct a 'struct argp_state' by itself, since > > [1] > > says that the 'struct argp_state' contains a member 'pstate' that is > > "Private, for use by the argp implementation.". > > > > 2) The only place in the gnulib / glibc code where a 'struct argp_state' is > > being constructed, is in function parser_init, invoked from 'argp_parse', > > and there a non-NULL value is assigned. > > > > In other words, there is no way, compliant with the documented API, that a > > NULL pointer can arise as state->pstate. > > > > Bruno > > > > [1] > > https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Argp-Parsing-State.html > > Thanks for taking a look. I don't have more information on this one > beyond the little that's in the commit, so unless Colin remembers why > this was needed in 2011, I'll propose grub drop it at some point.
The original problem was: https://bugs.debian.org/612692 At the time, __argp_help looked like this: void __argp_help (const struct argp *argp, FILE *stream, unsigned flags, char *name) { struct argp_state state; memset (&state, 0, sizeof state); state.root_argp = argp; _help (argp, &state, stream, flags, name); } As a result it was possible at the time to encounter the case where state was non-NULL but state->pstate was NULL. However, this seems to have been fixed differently some time ago: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=14a582531c So I think it's probably fine to drop this patch from GRUB. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@ubuntu.com]
