cast warnings

[Gene C.]

On Wednesday 28 January 2004 15:34, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 12:57:41PM -0500, Gene C. wrote:
> > I went to some effort to clean up nessus so building it had no cast
> > messages. But was it worth it.
>
> Here you are. :-)

My effort were to get rid of the cast messages and not to really fix the code 
(see below).  I did check the underlying code of the called function and it 
is going to work.  Nessus keeps a lot of its data in tables where an element 
"value" may contain a pointer or an integer having various meanings depending 
on the setting of another int variable in the element.  The storage for the 
"value" is defined as "void *" so the right size will be allocated.

>
> > For example, you have a function which extracts
> > something from an array/table and may return a pointer sometimes and
> > other times an integer.
>
> Then really union should have been used; but sources of X, for
> example, are chock-full of such junk and that's life.

Yes, sigh, you are right.  Doing things the right way would involve using a 
union.  

If I was the owner of a package, I might (almost assuredly would) do it the 
right way.  But, for many upstream package owners/originators/maintainers, 
they are more interested in package functionality than in doing things "the 
right way" so that the "right thing" is done regardless of the 
architecture/platform and moving to a system with 128 bit address still 
works.

If a package owner decides to do things "the right way", then it will likely 
get down.  For someone downstream to submit (likely extensive) patches is a 
whole different situation.  I will need to think about whether it is worth 
the attempt.

Thanks for your comment ... it clarified things for me.  The use of unions had 
occurred to me but I rejected it as too intrusive into the package owners 
efforts.
-- 
Gene