Coverity complains that we check whether "notes_ref" is NULL, but it was already implied to be non-NULL earlier in the function. And this is true; since b9342b3fd63 (refs: add array of ref namespaces, 2022-08-05), we call xstrdup(notes_ref) unconditionally, which would segfault if it was NULL. But that commit is actually doing the right thing. Even if NULL is passed into the function, we'll use default_notes_ref() as a fallback, which will never return NULL (it tries a few options, but its last resort is a string literal). Ironically, the "!notes_ref" check was added by the same commit that added the fallback: 709f79b0894 (Notes API: init_notes(): Initialize the notes tree from the given notes ref, 2010-02-13). So this check never did anything. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> --- notes.c | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/notes.c b/notes.c index 45fb7f22d1..cadb435056 100644 --- a/notes.c +++ b/notes.c @@ -1019,13 +1019,13 @@ void init_notes(struct notes_tree *t, const char *notes_ref, t->root = (struct int_node *) xcalloc(1, sizeof(struct int_node)); t->first_non_note = NULL; t->prev_non_note = NULL; - t->ref = xstrdup_or_null(notes_ref); + t->ref = xstrdup(notes_ref); t->update_ref = (flags & NOTES_INIT_WRITABLE) ? t->ref : NULL; t->combine_notes = combine_notes; t->initialized = 1; t->dirty = 0; - if (flags & NOTES_INIT_EMPTY || !notes_ref || + if (flags & NOTES_INIT_EMPTY || repo_get_oid_treeish(the_repository, notes_ref, &object_oid)) return; if (flags & NOTES_INIT_WRITABLE && read_ref(notes_ref, &object_oid)) -- 2.40.0.653.g15ca972062
