Jeff King authored Jun 05, 2013 and Junio C Hamano committed Jun 06, 2013

Many code paths will free a tree object's buffer and set it
to NULL after finishing with it in order to keep memory
usage down during a traversal. However, out of 8 sites that
do this, only one actually unsets the "parsed" flag back.
Those sites that don't are setting a trap for later users of
the tree object; even after calling parse_tree, the buffer
will remain NULL, causing potential segfaults.

It is not known whether this is triggerable in the current
code. Most commands do not do an in-memory traversal
followed by actually using the objects again. However, it
does not hurt to be safe for future callers.

In most cases, we can abstract this out to a
"free_tree_buffer" helper. However, there are two
exceptions:

  1. The fsck code relies on the parsed flag to know that we
     were able to parse the object at one point. We can
     switch this to using a flag in the "flags" field.

  2. The index-pack code sets the buffer to NULL but does
     not free it (it is freed by a caller). We should still
     unset the parsed flag here, but we cannot use our
     helper, as we do not want to free the buffer.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>