On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 1:33 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> wrote: > > This patch was originally only to appease Coverity, but it actually *does* > plug a very real memory leak: previously, *every* call to git_exec_path() > *possibly* returned a newly-malloc()ed buffer. Now, the first call will > store that pointer in a static variable and reuse it later. > > Could you maybe help me with improving the commit message? As someone not familiar with that area of code, this explained it enough for me to understand, so maybe: exec_cmd: do not leak via git_exec_path Every call to git_exec_path() possibly returned a newly-malloc()ed buffer. Now, the first call will allocate the buffer and subsequent calls return a pointer to it, which then prevents leaking memory on each call. The return value of a "const char *" hints to the caller, that the memory is not owned by the caller, do we need to be explicit there (i.e. a comment declaring the memory ownership? Probably not.) Thanks, Stefan