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  • Elijah Newren's avatar
    dir: fix problematic API to avoid memory leaks · eceba532
    Elijah Newren authored and Junio C Hamano's avatar Junio C Hamano committed
    
    
    The dir structure seemed to have a number of leaks and problems around
    it.  First I noticed that parent_hashmap and recursive_hashmap were
    being leaked (though Peff noticed and submitted fixes before me).  Then
    I noticed in the previous commit that clear_directory() was only taking
    responsibility for a subset of fields within dir_struct, despite the
    fact that entries[] and ignored[] we allocated internally to dir.c.
    That, of course, resulted in many callers either leaking or haphazardly
    trying to free these arrays and their contents.
    
    Digging further, I found that despite the pretty clear documentation
    near the top of dir.h that folks were supposed to call clear_directory()
    when the user no longer needed the dir_struct, there were four callers
    that didn't bother doing that at all.  However, two of them clearly
    thought about leaks since they had an UNLEAK(dir) directive, which to me
    suggests that the method to free the data was too unclear.  I suspect
    the non-obviousness of the API and its holes led folks to avoid it,
    which then snowballed into further problems with the entries[],
    ignored[], parent_hashmap, and recursive_hashmap problems.
    
    Rename clear_directory() to dir_clear() to be more in line with other
    data structures in git, and introduce a dir_init() to handle the
    suggested memsetting of dir_struct to all zeroes.  I hope that a name
    like "dir_clear()" is more clear, and that the presence of dir_init()
    will provide a hint to those looking at the code that they need to look
    for either a dir_clear() or a dir_free() and lead them to find
    dir_clear().
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarElijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    eceba532