object_array_entry: fix memory handling of the name field

Previously, the memory management of the object_array_entry::name
field was inconsistent and undocumented.  object_array_entries are
ultimately created by a single function, add_object_array_with_mode(),
which has an argument "const char *name".  This function used to
simply set the name field to reference the string pointed to by the
name parameter, and nobody on the object_array side ever freed the
memory.  Thus, it assumed that the memory for the name field would be
managed by the caller, and that the lifetime of that string would be
at least as long as the lifetime of the object_array_entry.  But
callers were inconsistent:

* Some passed pointers to constant strings or argv entries, which was
  OK.

* Some passed pointers to newly-allocated memory, but didn't arrange
  for the memory ever to be freed.

* Some passed the return value of sha1_to_hex(), which is a pointer to
  a statically-allocated buffer that can be overwritten at any time.

* Some passed pointers to refnames that they received from a
  for_each_ref()-type iteration, but the lifetimes of such refnames is
  not guaranteed by the refs API.

Bring consistency to this mess by changing object_array to make its
own copy for the object_array_entry::name field and free this memory
when an object_array_entry is deleted from the array.

Many callers were passing the empty string as the name parameter, so
as a performance optimization, treat the empty string specially.
Instead of making a copy, store a pointer to a statically-allocated
empty string to object_array_entry::name.  When deleting such an
entry, skip the free().

Change the callers that were already passing copies to
add_object_array_with_mode() to either skip the copy, or (if the
memory needed to be allocated anyway) freeing the memory itself.

A part of this commit effectively reverts

    70d26c6e76 read_revisions_from_stdin: make copies for handle_revision_arg

because the copying introduced by that commit (which is still
necessary) is now done at a deeper level.

Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/revision.c b/revision.c
index be73cb46c9..4aeda334db 100644
--- a/revision.c
+++ b/revision.c
@@ -88,7 +88,9 @@ void add_object(struct object *obj,
 		struct name_path *path,
 		const char *name)
 {
-	add_object_array(obj, path_name(path, name), p);
+	char *pn = path_name(path, name);
+	add_object_array(obj, pn, p);
+	free(pn);
 }
 
 static void mark_blob_uninteresting(struct blob *blob)
@@ -1288,7 +1290,7 @@ static void read_revisions_from_stdin(struct rev_info *revs,
 			}
 			die("options not supported in --stdin mode");
 		}
-		if (handle_revision_arg(xstrdup(sb.buf), revs, 0,
+		if (handle_revision_arg(sb.buf, revs, 0,
 					REVARG_CANNOT_BE_FILENAME))
 			die("bad revision '%s'", sb.buf);
 	}