[tor-bugs] #6877 [Tor]: Finally replace all char[] buffers with uint8_t[] buffers

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#6877: Finally replace all char[] buffers with uint8_t[] buffers
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     Reporter:  nickm   |      Owner:
         Type:  defect  |     Status:  needs_revision
     Priority:  major   |  Milestone:  Tor: 0.2.6.x-final
    Component:  Tor     |    Version:
   Resolution:          |   Keywords:  tor-client
Actual Points:          |  Parent ID:
       Points:          |
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Changes (by nickm):

 * status:  needs_review => needs_revision
 * milestone:  Tor: 0.2.5.x-final => Tor: 0.2.6.x-final


Comment:

 Looking at the volume of patches that would be necessary to actually do
 this throughout tor, we need to find an easier, more automatable approach
 for validating patches here.  If we do this as a series of n-thousand-line
 patches for each module converted, we'll surely have more patches than we
 can review or validate without the certainty of missing something,
 somewhere.

 One option that Andrea and I discussed is to try to divide changes into:
   - one set of small patches that change function declarations: these
 would make things non-compiling, and these would be reviewed manually.
   - one set of bigger patches that do NOTHING besides add/remove casts to
 char* and uint8_t*, and change char types to uint8_t.  These patches would
 be machine-verifiable to make no other changes, even to whitespace or
 formatting.
   - one set of misc patches that would do other stuff, as needed.  These
 would be reviewed manually, and would be very small.

 After that, we could do manual whitespace cleanup.

 It's a bit of an irksome way to do development, but I think that the
 experiment here suggests that reviewing a non-automatable approach is
 going to be difficult too because of the volume of code.

 Either way, this is something to revisit in 0.2.6.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6877#comment:11>
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