Re: [PATCH 08/22] config: fix leaking comment character config

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 8, 2024, 15:54 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq1q2zko2a.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <ZrRR9mwyQQrw4Dg5@tanuki>

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Now that I revisit this commit I'm not quite happy with it anymore. We
> still need to have the cast, which is somewhat awkward. I think the
> better solution is to instead have a `comment_line_str_allocated`
> variable that is non-constant. I'll adapt the code accordingly.
>
> An even better solution would be to have `struct strbuf` provide an
> initializer that populates it with a string constant. But that feels
> like a larger undertaking, so I'll leave that for the future.

FWIW, I found the "now we have a variable to refer to the address of the string constant, we can compare to detect if we allocated and need to free" in this round is a good place to stop.

I view the approach to use an auxiliary variable *_allocated is a regression compared to what we see here. The approach makes it easy to forget to futz it when an allocated piece of memory is assigned to the main variable.