Re: [PATCH 02/13] sparse-checkout: pass string literals directly to add_pattern()

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > The add_pattern() function takes a pattern string, but neither makes a
> > copy of it nor takes ownership of the memory. So it is the caller's
> > responsibility to make sure the string hangs around as long as the
> > pattern_list which references it.
> 
> Wow.  That's an extremely bad API.
> 
> I suspect that it long time ago did not aggressively "pre-parse" the
> given pattern string and kept the original copy in the struct (i.e.,
> taking ownership), and these copies of the literal strings were made
> at the calling sites with the expectation that the API takes
> ownership of them, as most of the strings fed to add_pattern() are
> what we read from the environment into heap.