Re: [PATCH 1/4] revision: make handle_dotdot() interface less confusing

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

>> And once we accept that it is inevitable to make a copy, everything
>> else falls into the right place.
>
> Yeah, I don't think there is another good option. We can drop the
> "const" from the interface, which would be more honest, but then callers
> that use string literals have to either make their own copy, or cast
> away the constness and pray.
>
> The only "right" solution that avoids copying is if all of the
> lower-level functions learned to work with ptr/len pairs instead of
> NUL-terminated strings. But having done that sort of conversion before,
> it ends up quite messy and is prone to errors. Somebody is welcome to
> try tackling that if they want, but I don't. :)

We would need to call out to a library function or system call
eventually down the callchain, at which point you'd need to somehow
come up with a NUL-terminated equivalent of that <ptr, len> pair.

So I would avoid going down that path, unless the language itself
has already abstracted that difference away, and C is not among
those languages.