On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 10:18:30AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > This cast made me wonder why it was OK to write to system_wide. The > > answer is that system_path() hands ownership of the memory to us, since > > 59362e560d (system_path(): always return free'able memory to the caller, > > 2014-11-24). So I think the better solution than the cast is to drop the > > "const" from its declaration to better indicate our ownership within the > > function. > > Makes sense, I changed it to `static char *system_wide;`. Thanks, perfect. > > I also wondered how we know that system_wide is a large enough buffer, > > but I guess normalizing always makes things smaller. It would be nice if > > normalize_path_copy() said so in its docstring, but that is certainly > > not new to your patch. :) > > Well, `normalize_path_copy()`'s documentation says: > > It is okay if dst == src, but they should not overlap otherwise. > > But yes, that does not state explicitly that the resulting string won't > be longer than the original one. It is currently true, though the > documentation hints at the possibility that a future version might > follow symbolic links (in which case it would no longer be true). But > then, that would technically not be normalization anymore, but > canonicalization. Yeah, and I think we already have functions that do that (and return an allocated buffer). I have a few cleanups around some callers of normalize_path_copy(), so I'll roll in the documentation change I suggested. -Peff
