prefer git_pathdup to git_path in some possibly-dangerous cases

Because git_path uses a static buffer that is shared with
calls to git_path, mkpath, etc, it can be dangerous to
assign the result to a variable or pass it to a non-trivial
function. The value may change unexpectedly due to other
calls.

None of the cases changed here has a known bug, but they're
worth converting away from git_path because:

  1. It's easy to use git_pathdup in these cases.

  2. They use constructs (like assignment) that make it
     hard to tell whether they're safe or not.

The extra malloc overhead should be trivial, as an
allocation should be an order of magnitude cheaper than a
system call (which we are clearly about to make, since we
are constructing a filename). The real cost is that we must
remember to free the result.

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

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/unpack-trees.c b/unpack-trees.c
index d6cf84904f..7bb446a4af 100644
--- a/unpack-trees.c
+++ b/unpack-trees.c
@@ -1029,10 +1029,12 @@ int unpack_trees(unsigned len, struct tree_desc *t, struct unpack_trees_options
 	if (!core_apply_sparse_checkout || !o->update)
 		o->skip_sparse_checkout = 1;
 	if (!o->skip_sparse_checkout) {
-		if (add_excludes_from_file_to_list(git_path("info/sparse-checkout"), "", 0, &el, 0) < 0)
+		char *sparse = git_pathdup("info/sparse-checkout");
+		if (add_excludes_from_file_to_list(sparse, "", 0, &el, 0) < 0)
 			o->skip_sparse_checkout = 1;
 		else
 			o->el = &el;
+		free(sparse);
 	}
 
 	memset(&o->result, 0, sizeof(o->result));