Re: [PATCH] use xstrdup, not strdup in ll-merge.c

[Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com>]

2009/6/15 Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>:
> Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com> wrote:
>> As much as I'd like to know as much as possible about why something
>> failed, I can't make a failure handling automatically simple (given the tools).
>> I do suggest using goto to handle this particular OOM (below), but it looks
>> almost too ugly. Maybe I am just paranoid, and am overdoing this particular
>> case.
>
> Yes, this is horrible.  Its a huge amount of code for checking a
> strdup failure that is unlikely to occur out of a configuration file.
>
> Really, how big is that config file?  It can't be so large that a
> strdup() is likely to run out of memory pulling a value from it.

Oh, I don't worry about config files being too big (it is noticeable
without this checks). I'm worried about our bugs triggering the
conditions where allocation routines return NULL, like heap corruption
which is hard to notice without valgrind.

>> The "goto oom" patch:
>
> NAK.  We don't do this anywhere else in git.  Please don't start now.

We'll have to start paying more attention to memory management sometime.
Although, this particular case may be not the best case for it.