Re: [PATCH] sockaddr.3type: BUGS: Document that libc should be fixed using a union

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2023 at 04:28:36PM +0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> As discussed before, and Bastien and I seem to agree, ideally we should
> define the following types:
> 
>     struct sockaddr_storage {
>         union {
>             struct {
>                 sa_family_t      ss_family;
>             };
>             struct sockaddr_in   sin;
>             struct sockaddr_in6  sin6;
>             struct sockaddr_un   sun;
>             // ...
>         };
>     };

AFAIK this is not permitted because of namespace. sys/socket.h is not
permitted to expose sockaddr_{in,in6,un}. And if you defined
differently-tagged structures with the same contents, it would not do
any good; accessing the members with the wrong-tagged struct type
would still be UB.

Really, there is no action needed here. Nothing is wrong on libc's
side. The problem is just that the type is *not useful for anything*
and should not be used except in the context of sizeof, which is
purely a documentation issue.

>     struct [[deprecated]] sockaddr {
>         sa_family_t              sa_family;
>     };
> 
>     union [[gnu::transparent_union]] sockaddr_ptr {
>         struct sockaddr_storage  *ss;
>         struct sockaddr          *sa;
>     };
> 
> And then we could define APIs like:
> 
>     int bind(int sockfd, const union sockaddr_ptr *addr, socklen_t len);

You cannot just change APIs because you wish they were different.
Ideally bind, etc. would just take void *, which is what the struct
sockaddr * is being used as. But they don't, so callers have to cast.
It's ugly but it's really not a big deal. Much less of a big deal than
breaking the interface because you think it would look prettier if it
had been done differently.

Rich