avoid sprintf and strcpy with flex arrays

When we are allocating a struct with a FLEX_ARRAY member, we
generally compute the size of the array and then sprintf or
strcpy into it. Normally we could improve a dynamic allocation
like this by using xstrfmt, but it doesn't work here; we
have to account for the size of the rest of the struct.

But we can improve things a bit by storing the length that
we use for the allocation, and then feeding it to xsnprintf
or memcpy, which makes it more obvious that we are not
writing more than the allocated number of bytes.

It would be nice if we had some kind of helper for
allocating generic flex arrays, but it doesn't work that
well:

 - the call signature is a little bit unwieldy:

      d = flex_struct(sizeof(*d), offsetof(d, path), fmt, ...);

   You need offsetof here instead of just writing to the
   end of the base size, because we don't know how the
   struct is packed (partially this is because FLEX_ARRAY
   might not be zero, though we can account for that; but
   the size of the struct may actually be rounded up for
   alignment, and we can't know that).

 - some sites do clever things, like over-allocating because
   they know they will write larger things into the buffer
   later (e.g., struct packed_git here).

So we're better off to just write out each allocation (or
add type-specific helpers, though many of these are one-off
allocations anyway).

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/submodule.c b/submodule.c
index 245ed4dfbb..c480ed53b4 100644
--- a/submodule.c
+++ b/submodule.c
@@ -122,6 +122,7 @@ static int add_submodule_odb(const char *path)
 	struct strbuf objects_directory = STRBUF_INIT;
 	struct alternate_object_database *alt_odb;
 	int ret = 0;
+	int alloc;
 	const char *git_dir;
 
 	strbuf_addf(&objects_directory, "%s/.git", path);
@@ -142,9 +143,10 @@ static int add_submodule_odb(const char *path)
 					objects_directory.len))
 			goto done;
 
-	alt_odb = xmalloc(objects_directory.len + 42 + sizeof(*alt_odb));
+	alloc = objects_directory.len + 42; /* for "12/345..." sha1 */
+	alt_odb = xmalloc(sizeof(*alt_odb) + alloc);
 	alt_odb->next = alt_odb_list;
-	strcpy(alt_odb->base, objects_directory.buf);
+	xsnprintf(alt_odb->base, alloc, "%s", objects_directory.buf);
 	alt_odb->name = alt_odb->base + objects_directory.len;
 	alt_odb->name[2] = '/';
 	alt_odb->name[40] = '\0';