I just wasted a bunch of time diagnosing a problem that was caused by other code's misuse of a temporary buffer created by get_pathname() (patch forthcoming). The bug was triggered by totally unrelated (and innocent) code changes that I had made. I found it quite difficult to figure out the source of the problem. It is probably obvious to everybody else, but here are the two tricks that finally enabled me to diagnose the problem: 1. I increased the number of temporary buffers available to get_pathname(). This made the test suite failure go away, which was a good indication that the problem was related to the buffers. 2. I changed get_pathname() to allocate and free the buffers instead of using statically-allocated buffers. This made it trivial to find the offender using valgrind. This patch series make it easier to apply these tricks. I hope it helps somebody else avoid the pain that I just experienced. Michael Haggerty (2): Make the number of pathname buffers a compile-time constant Make misuse of get_pathname() buffers detectable by valgrind path.c | 43 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- 1 files changed, 41 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) -- 1.7.7.rc2 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html