Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
It's possible that switching it would create bugs elsewhere (there are
over 100 uses of strbuf_detach, so maybe somebody really does want this
NULL behavior), but I tend to think it is just as likely to be fixing
undiscovered bugs.
Yeah, I tend to agree.
This "format-patch --notes" is obviously a post 1.8.0 topic, and so
is the strbuf_detach() clean-up. Let me bookmark this thread in
case it hasn't been resolved when I came back from my vacation, so
that I won't forget ;-).