Re: [GSoC][RFC][PATCH 1/2] STRBUF_INIT_CONST: a new way to initialize strbuf

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 8:21 AM Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

Your second patch catches cases where the strbuf functions want to write
to the buffer. But we've always been pretty open about the fact that
strbuf.buf is a writeable C-style string. So something like this:
...
would generate no compile-time warnings, but would invoke undefined
behavior (on my system it segfaults when run, but it could have even
more confusing outcomes).

Oh right, I didn't think about that. Ignorant of me to expect everyone to just
call the functions and not edit the buf directly.

If we want to pursue this direction, I think we'd do better to give each
strbuf a matching array. Something like:
...
So I think there are interesting directions here, but there's a lot of
stuff to figure out.

I think that got me a bit fired up now.

I notice you put GSoC in your subject line. If you're looking at this as
a microproject, IMHO this is _way_ more complicated and subtle than a
microproject should be. The goal there is to give something so easy that
you get to focus on getting your patches in and interacting with the
community. The scope I'd expect is more along the lines of compiling
with -Wwrite-strings and cleaning up some of the locations that
complain.

I'm actually planning to keep on contributing to git, so I kind of
didn't want to
do something trivial. Despite the fact that I'm planning to apply to
git for GSoC,
I'm mostly putting the [GSoC] so that reviewers would go easy on me :D. That
said, I might actually do the -Wwrite-strings clean-up after this one
is finished.

Thanks for the help, I guess I'll start editing it ASAP, then.

- mo7sener