Re: [PATCH] mailmap: fix check for freeing memory

On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 04:17:07PM +0200, Stefan Beller wrote:

Stepping two steps back, I am trying to figure out, what this repo_abrev
thing is doing, as I could find no documentation.

It's meant to abbreviate long pathnames in subject lines. As you noted,
the kernel .mailmap has:

  # repo-abbrev: /pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/

Try "git shortlog" in the kernel and grep for "..." to see its effect.

It is IMHO a misfeature to have it as part of .mailmap, but it is there
for historical reasons. And I think it is not really needed these days
anyway, as the messages created by git-merge are nicer to read in the
first place (and people tend to use nice readable URLs for accessing
one-off git pulls, too).

So we're passing there an address, which was just set to zero.
This is the only occurence of passing a value at all and the value
being passed is 0, so the free in the original patch doesn't need
that check either.

Right. I think the intent was to free a previously found repo-abbrev
line to avoid leaking memory (although arguably, it would make sense to
keep a list and abbreviate all that we find, I don't think anybody cares
anymore for the reasons I stated above).

-Peff