The GNU Project is famous for its coding style — Linus Torvalds even suggests to print them out, but not read them; burning them is a great symbolic gesture. Legibility issues aside (Linus’ own are interestingly similar to style(9) aka KNF, the BSD coding styles), why is that so?

mksh-current (R40+) now supports pathnames in arbitrary lengths on Debian GNU/Hurd (I think; I only could test on gnubber.bddebian.org that it compiles, seeing that all existing installations set sysconf(_PC_PATH_MAX) to 1024 to be consistent with POSIX PATH_MAX) by using some glibc-only functions. This is because Hurd does not have PATH_MAX (some older systems also don’t have it, but there, we just define it to POSIX 1024 and good is). Now, why? Simple: because the GNU coding style says to have “no arbitrary limits” in your code.

I would like to call that ridiculous, but it’s actually dangerous: if you are on a 32-bit machine and have a pathname of 512 MiB, you’re in danger of freezing your system or at least crashing mksh, even if you have the full 4 GiB worth of RAM, due to the amount of copying and carrying around pathnames. This is a security relevant issue, in my eyes.
Now on to the ridicule part: This is Open Source, people! Change the limit (as it’s a — only one — constant in a header file) and recompile everything! Simple as that! The BSDs do it all the time! In GNU, it’s even simpler because you force developers, redistributors and some users to actually give up freedom and require them to put the source code alongside. Now, why doesn’t anybody see this? I can’t be the only one, can I? (I actually think that changeable limits would suffice the horrid GNU coding style, but find myself reluctant to read it again due to its sheer size — similar to their licences…)

On an unrelated note, I hope to have a bi-arch ISO format snapshot on BitTorrent by end of the month. Mika is also trying to put a new Grml release out by then, of course with an up-to-date MirOS bsd4grml ☺