[drmaa-wg] buffer length/size

[Piotr Domagalski]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 05:17:37PM +0200, Piotr Domagalski wrote:

> a wrong argument in function calls could lead to a crash. From C-binding
> document:
> 
>   job_id_len - The size in characters of the job identifier buffer.
> 
> This would clearly mean sizeof(buf), but the "characters" makes me think
> it could be the maximum number of printable characters that will be put
> into the buffer. In my opionion this word is not needed here, it should
> only say "the size of the job identifier buffer".

... and as I see in SGE's DRMAA implementation[1], all the _len
arguments are treated as maximum string lengths, thus the input buffer
is always considered to have size of (job_id_len + 1).

So, to sum up, should implementations treat these arguments as size of
the buffer or the maximum string length that would be put into the
buffer?

---------------------

[1] By the way: some comments in the code are a bit misleading:

  OUTPUTS
     char *job_id             - buffer for resulting jobid 
     size_t job_id_len        - size of job_id buffer
     char *error_diagnosis    - diagnosis buffer
     size_t error_diag_len    - diagnosis buffer length

The "size of job_id buffer" seems completly wrong, whereas "buffer
length" is not a clear wording from the C language perspective.

-- 
Piotr Domagalski