On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 08:16:38PM -0400, Eric Sunshine wrote: > > +/* > > + * Retrieves the name of the default branch. If `short_name` is non-zero, the > > + * branch name will be prefixed with "refs/heads/". > > + */ > > +char *git_default_branch_name(int short_name); > > Overall, the internal logic regarding duplicating/freeing strings > would probably be easier to grok if there were two separate functions: > > char *git_default_branch_name(void); > char *git_default_ref_name(void); > > but that's subjective. Having seen one of the callers, might it be worth avoiding handing off ownership of the string entirely? I.e., this comes from a string that's already owned for the lifetime of the process (either the environment, or a string stored by the config machinery). Could we just pass that back (or if we want to be more careful about getenv() lifetimes, we can copy it into a static owned by this function)? Then all of the callers can stop dealing with the extra free(), and you can do: const char *git_default_branch_name(void) { return skip_prefix("refs/heads/", git_default_ref_name()); } -Peff