two questions about GDB coding standards

[Wu Zhou <woodzltc@cn.ibm.com>]

Hello all,

I am now reading GDB coding standards(section 13.4 of GDB Internals)
and have two questions as follow.  Maybe someone of you could clarify
for me.  Thanks in advance. 

1. In section 13.4.2(memory management), it is said that gdb uses the 
string function xstrdup and the print function xasprintf.  But I saw 
in the source codes that most places use sprintf instead.  Besides 
this in-consistence, we also know that sprintf is very prone to buffer
overflow error.  So my question here is whether sprintf should be 
replaced by xasprintf here or is there any plan to achieve this? 

2. In section 13.4.3(compiler warnings), it is said that: due to the 
way that gdb is implemented most functions have unused parameters.  
Consequently the warning "-Wunused-parameter" is precluded from the 
list.  What is the way it refered in this context?  BTW, I also find
there are many unused variables in gdb source codes by using a static 
analysis tool.  But there is no "-Wunused-variable" in compiler option
to detect this.  My question here is: should this kind of unused
variables be detected or furthermore be removed out of the source to 
make it more readable?  The coding standards doesn't say anything 
about this. 

Thanks for your attention. 

Cheers
- Wu Zhou