Re: [PATCH 0/5] const-correctness in grep.c

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Sep 21, 2021, 04:30 UTC
Message-ID: <YUlf8HyBWC7aDF8n@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <YUlVZk1xXulAqdef@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 11:45:42PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> While discussing [1], I noticed that the grep code mostly takes
> non-const buffers, even though it is conceptually a read-only operation
> to search in them. The culprit is a handful of spots that temporarily
> tie off NUL-terminated strings by overwriting a byte of the buffer and
> then restoring it. But I think we no longer need to do so these days,
> now that we have a regexec_buf() that can take a ptr/size pair.

This all looks very reasonable to me. I appreciated the way you broke up each spot that unnecessarily modified a buffer into its own patch with its own explanation.

I looked through each of the three spots you mentioned with a close eye and concurred with your reasoning. (To the extent it was possible, I tried to ignore most of your commentary until I had generated my own understanding while searching through my copy of grep.c).

Thanks for an enjoyable set of patches to read.

    Reviewed-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>

> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/git/YUk3zwuse56v76ze@coredump.intra.peff.net/

Thanks, Taylor