Ingo / Chuck - Get involved

Get involved - OpenBSD

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: opportunity to help: %s audit in mandoc
Date: 2016-08-07 11:57
From: Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>
To: misc@openbsd.org

Hi,

from time to time, people ask how they can help OpenBSD development
if they are new to that task.

Right now, there is a useful opportunity.  Take the code in
/usr/src/usr.bin/mandoc/, grep(1) it for "%s", and audit all instances
you find, figuring out whether they can be reached with the char *
being NULL or not.  If you find one where the pointer can be NULL,
construct an input file and a command line (for example, "'mandoc
-Tlint foo.mdoc' or 'makewhatis -t foo.mdoc' with the attached
file foo.mdoc") demonstrating that man(1), apropos(1), mandoc(1),
or makewhatis(8) actually print "(null)", and send the report to
me.

The task is not very difficult, but requires considerable time (i
guess i would need up to two days to do the full audit, even though
i know the code very well).  I have a huge backlog of patches to
check and a huge backlog of tricky programming tasks to tackle.
Once somebody finds these issues for me, fixing them is trivial,
and i can focus on work that is less easy to do for newcomers.

Besides, this will improve your code reading and auditing skills.
If you find a few things, you could even try to tackle other
parts of the tree which are more difficult.

In mandoc, there are almost certainly some instances because
until now, i wasn't aware that printf("%s", NULL) is problematic.

Yours,
  Ingo