Re: history: 'reword HEAD' surfaces a memory leak

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Mon, Sep 07, 2026 at 05:16:44PM +0530, Kaartic Sivaraam wrote:
> On 9/7/26 16:43, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> > 
> > This feels familiar, even though it doesn't reproduce on my machine. Do
> > you have "i18n.commitencoding" set? In any case, I think the following
> > patch should fix it:
> > 
> > diff --git a/builtin/history.c b/builtin/history.c
> > index 000155ad9c..bca95b9d05 100644
> > --- a/builtin/history.c
> > +++ b/builtin/history.c
> > @@ -158,6 +158,7 @@ static int commit_tree_ext(struct repository *repo,
> >   	*out = lookup_commit_or_die(&rewritten_commit_oid, "rewritten commit");
> >   out:
> > +	repo_unuse_commit_buffer(repo, commit_with_message, original_message);
> >   	free_commit_extra_headers(original_extra_headers);
> >   	strbuf_release(&commit_message);
> >   	free(original_author);
> > 
> > I know that we've already been discussing this memory leak on the
> > mailing list at one point in time, and we've already had a patch similar
> > to the above. So why wasn't this merged...?
> > 
> 
> My bad, I suppose. There was a suggestion by Peff that the commit message
> was misleading. Per [2], the leak only happens when we get a commit that
> isn't cached in the commit slab. I was trying to identify the specific case
> in which we get a commit that's not cached in the slab but eventually got
> busy with other work. I will get around to it soon and send a long pending
> re-roll.
> 
> [[ References ]]
> 
> [2]:
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/94b0bed5-c86a-4291-b958-52f09faebd29@gmail.com/

Awesome, thanks!

Patrick