Add comments to try to prevent recurrence of #31495.

There is a bad design choice in two of our configuration types,
where the empty string encodes a value that is not the same as the
default value.  This design choice, plus an implementation mistake,
meant that config_dup() did not preserve the value of routerset_t,
and thereby caused bug #31495.

This comment-only patch documents the two types with the problem,
and suggests that implementors try to avoid it in the future.

Closes ticket 31907.
This commit is contained in:
Nick Mathewson 2019-10-01 09:42:10 -04:00
parent 53116ca0b7
commit 39640728c3
3 changed files with 17 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -473,6 +473,13 @@ routerset_free_(routerset_t *routerset)
* routerset_t** passed as <b>target</b>. On success return 0; on failure
* return -1 and store an error message into *<b>errmsg</b>.
**/
/*
* Warning: For this type, the default value (NULL) and "" are sometimes
* considered different values. That is generally risky, and best avoided for
* other types in the future. For cases where we want the default to be "all
* routers" (like EntryNodes) we should add a new routerset value indicating
* "all routers" (see #31908)
*/
static int
routerset_kv_parse(void *target, const config_line_t *line, char **errmsg,
const void *params)

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@ -44,6 +44,10 @@
// CONFIG_TYPE_FILENAME
//
// These two types are the same for now, but they have different names.
//
// Warning: For this type, the default value (NULL) and "" are considered
// different values. That is generally risky, and best avoided for other
// types in the future.
//////
static int

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@ -39,6 +39,12 @@ struct config_line_t;
* All functions here take a <b>params</b> argument, whose value
* is determined by the type definition. Two types may have the
* same functions, but differ only in parameters.
*
* Implementation considerations: If "" encodes a valid value for a type, try
* to make sure that it encodes the same thing as the default value for the
* type (that is, the value that is set by config_clear() or memset(0)). If
* this is not the case, you need to make extra certain that your parse/encode
* implementations preserve the NULL/"" distinction.
**/
struct var_type_fns_t {
/**