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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2022 12:45:23 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: NRK <nrk@...root.org>
Cc: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: hostname is using a case sensitive search in function
 name_from_hosts

On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 10:19:24PM +0600, NRK wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2022 at 04:34:27PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > strcasestr isn't a good match here, because it's quadratic time and
> > would be potentially quite slow (depending on file contents). It's
> > also not in a usable namespace, and is something of a junk function we
> > included for questionable reasons.
> 
> A bit off-topic, but is there any desire to improve the strcasestr
> performance? If there is, then I can supply the patch as I was playing
> around with it a couple weeks ago.

I'm not sure. It's an interesting research problem whether it can be
made linear-time in constant space -- I mean, for a dumb
single-byte-only version like we do now, I'm pretty sure it can, but
I'm doubtful the same can be done for one that respects full multibyte
case mapping.

But aside from that, I'm not sure if there's much practical value. The
function is not really appropriate for much real-world use, especially
as long as it doesn't respect non-ASCII case mappings, and was
probably a mistake to include to begin with. If there are simple
changes that could be made to make it "less awfully slow", that's
probably ok, but anything that involves open-coding a more complex
implementation without actually making this a high-quality usable
function seems like an unwanted increase in code complexity and
potential bug-surface/maintenance-burden without a good motivation.

Rich

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