Re: Problem listing GIT repository with accents

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

And here is what the "quote embedded NULs" patch would look like on top.
It's actually pretty straightforward, but the more I think of it, the
more I think it is probably not worthwhile. Not only are we quoting
paths, which should not have embedded NULs, but it requires that the
caller always pass the length explicitly, and clearly we are not doing
that all or even most of the time. So while this would fix the low-level
"this function quotes an arbitrary string" case, for it to be of any use
all of the code paths leading to it would need to be audited to handle
NUL-embedded strings.

Thanks; I think your analysis is very sound.

The current callers do not care (for a good reason).  They are dealing
with a pathname, and either they are feeding a string on which there is a
pathname followed by something else and they know where that something
else begins (they give maxlen because they don't want to or cannot NUL
terminate the string in place while calling this function), or they know
they want to quote to the end of the string but they haven't counted how
long it is (they say "I don't care---just quote to the end").  In either
way, they don't expect giving too long a maxlen will go beyond the end of
the string past the terminating NUL.

Unless we document "this function is to C-quote a (portion of a) string,
either to the end or up to the given length", however, future callers may
incorrectly assume that with length the function can be fed anything and
would C-quote that piece of memory.  The argument name "const char *name"
already suggests that is not an arbitrary binary rubbish, changing that to
"str" would probably make that a bit stronger documentation, or we could
explicitly say "this is a (early part of a) NUL-terminated string" in a
comment.

But your one-liner patch would actually be a smaller change than any of
them and makes the whole problem disappear; wouldn't it be a far better
solution?