Re: [PATCH 06/11] config: use git_config_string() in easy cases

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Apr 7, 2024, 02:05 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cST40pM5PdGA==o8aGFwv8kStzzC8=28NULUtV8OFJmLg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20240407010228.GF868358@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Sat, Apr 6, 2024 at 9:02 PM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

> config: use git_config_string() in easy cases

Did you instead mean?

    config: use git_config_string_dup() in easy cases

> (like the one above), we can easily convert them to use a variant of the
> helper that frees the existing value before writing over it. That works
> because free(NULL) is a noop. What we can't change, though, is cases
> where the pointer is initialized to a string literal, like:

Fun historical (historic?) fact: On NeXTSTEP operating system, free(NULL) and realloc(NULL,n) would crash the program, so getting non-native (open-source) code to run correctly often involved more than a little effort..

Show 11 quoted lines

>   const char *foo = "some string literal";
>
> In that case it would be incorrect to free() the original value. Those
> cases will take more refactoring to make them leak-free, and this patch
> punts on that for now.
>
> In each case we switch the underlying variable from "const char *" to
> "char *" to indicate that it will always point to allocated memory (and
> our git_config_string_dup() interface enforces this).
>
> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>