265693 - [meta] review callers of PR_sscanf for error handling

Status: NEW

(Core :: General, task)

Description

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

most callers of PR_sscanf ignore the return value. I suspect that this is not
always a good thing; they should probably check that it succeeded.


some of those are in necko... of those, some were added by me :(

assigning to me for now... if someone else wants this bug, feel free to take :-)

Comment 1

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/reference/html/prprf.html#23633

Comment 2

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

taking.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 4

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

confirming again. there's still plenty of callers of PR_sscanf that ignore the return value, including in mailnews.

Comment 5

[Philip Chee]

Moving to Core.

Comment 6

[Philip Chee]

Really moving to Core this time.

Comment 7

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

This is about the callers of an NSPR method, not about the method itself, so I don't think NSPR is the correct component.

That being said, this is a vague 20 year old idea without any work on it so I don't know if it is useful to have it open. Although looking at it now, there are really not that many callers that aren't checking the return value.

Comment 8

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

I've filed separate bugs for all of the places that don't check the return value. There are only a few. There's an additional place in nss_dbm_db_get_format_version() here in security/nss/lib/ckfw/dbm/db.c, but that casts the return value to void, which suggests they are intentionally ignoring the return value.