From: Jeff King Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2016 20:28:20 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] revert: clarify seemingly bogus OPT_END repetition Message-ID: <20160705202820.GA14496@sigill.intra.peff.net> In-Reply-To: <5b424bad41ca027b39eea4b1fa9d87df0a489e0f.1467719888.git.johannes.schindelin@gmx.de> On Tue, Jul 05, 2016 at 01:58:51PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > This developer stumbled over repeated OPT_END entries and was *so > close* (almost touches his thumb with his index finger) to collapse > them into a single one. Only inspecting the file's history with > `git log -p -SOPT_END` clarified why they are there. Wow, that's really ugly, and confused me, too. I've been trying to move us away from this kind of manually-computed array size, simply because it's error-prone and often not obviously correct[1]. I wonder if parse_options_concat should simply allocate a new list (after computing the total required size). I guess this is the only caller, though, so perhaps it's not the end of the world. In the meantime, your patch is certainly an improvement. By the way, I notice that the error message when concat fails is just: if (parse_options_concat(options, ARRAY_SIZE(options), cp_extra)) die(_("program error")); Should this become: die("BUG: not enough room to concatenate options"); as part of your BUG cleanups elsewhere? -Peff [1] At least the concat interface takes ARRAY_SIZE(), so that we will catch an error, rather than silently causing memory corruption. A much more likely error is to forget OPT_END(), which will cause parse_options to read past the end of the array.