[pacman-dev] Dealing with asprintf failures

[Allan McRae]

The remaining warnings generated with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 are usages of 
asprintf in src/pacman/util.c.

e.g.
util.c: In function ‘display_targets’:
util.c:533:12: warning: ignoring return value of ‘asprintf’, declared 
with attribute warn_unused_result

What is the best way to deal with these? One idea is:

- asprintf(&str, "%s-%s [%.2f MB]", alpm_pkg_get_name(pkg),
-                alpm_pkg_get_version(pkg), mbsize);
+ if(asprintf(&str, "%s-%s [%.2f MB]", alpm_pkg_get_name(pkg),
+                   alpm_pkg_get_version(pkg), mbsize) == -1) {
+   pm_fprintf(stderr, PM_LOG_ERROR,  _("failed to allocate string\n"));
+ }

This prints an error, but does not actually bail, on failure of 
asprintf.  This is an improvement over the current code as we would know 
where the error occurred, but feels wrong not to exit.  Note that 
several of the functions affected return void, so erroring out is not a 
simple "return -1".

So, any ideas on the best way to approach this?

Allan