Linus Torvalds authored Jun 17, 2009 and Junio C Hamano committed Jun 18, 2009

Shifting 'unsigned char' or 'unsigned short' left can result in sign
extension errors, since the C integer promotion rules means that the
unsigned char/short will get implicitly promoted to a signed 'int' due to
the shift (or due to other operations).

This normally doesn't matter, but if you shift things up sufficiently, it
will now set the sign bit in 'int', and a subsequent cast to a bigger type
(eg 'long' or 'unsigned long') will now sign-extend the value despite the
original expression being unsigned.

One example of this would be something like

	unsigned long size;
	unsigned char c;

	size += c << 24;

where despite all the variables being unsigned, 'c << 24' ends up being a
signed entity, and will get sign-extended when then doing the addition in
an 'unsigned long' type.

Since git uses 'unsigned char' pointers extensively, we actually have this
bug in a couple of places.

I may have missed some, but this is the result of looking at

	git grep '[^0-9 	][ 	]*<<[ 	][a-z]' -- '*.c' '*.h'
	git grep '<<[   ]*24'

which catches at least the common byte cases (shifting variables by a
variable amount, and shifting by 24 bits).

I also grepped for just 'unsigned char' variables in general, and
converted the ones that most obviously ended up getting implicitly cast
immediately anyway (eg hash_name(), encode_85()).

In addition to just avoiding 'unsigned char', this patch also tries to use
a common idiom for the delta header size thing. We had three different
variations on it: "& 0x7fUL" in one place (getting the sign extension
right), and "& ~0x80" and "& 0x7f" in two other places (not getting it
right). Apart from making them all just avoid using "unsigned char" at
all, I also unified them to then use a simple "& 0x7f".

I considered making a sparse extension which warns about doing implicit
casts from unsigned types to signed types, but it gets rather complex very
quickly, so this is just a hack.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>