Re: [PATCH 1/2] drop length limitations on gecos-derived names and emails

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 12:28:24PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

When we pull the user's name from the GECOS field of the
passwd file (or generate an email address based on their
username and hostname), we put the result into a
static buffer. While it's extremely unlikely that anybody
ever hit these limits (after all, in such a case their
parents must have hated them), we still had to deal with the
error cases in our code.

Converting these static buffers to strbufs lets us simplify
the code and drop some error messages from the documentation
that have confused some users.

Note that there is still one length limitation: the
gethostname interface requires us to provide a static
buffer, so we arbitrarily choose 1024 bytes for the
hostname.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <redacted>

Ick, there is something very wrong with this patch. While testing a
completely unrelated bug, I noticed that it set my name to "Jeff
KingJeff KingJeff King". Which, while a wonderful ego massage, is
probably excessive.

I'm sure the problem is the switch to strbuf's appending semantics
rather than strlcpy's overwriting semantics. I thought we were careful
not to bother re-run the gecos code if we had already gotten a name, but
obviously that is not the case in some code paths. I'll investigate.

-Peff