Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:
Oh wow, from a cursory look it seems as if the diff machinery was not
exactly careful with releasing memory. I might be mistaken, but if I am
not, then this would deserve a separate patch series, methinks.
I wouldn't be surprised if newer parts of it is much less careful
than the older parts of the machinery. Most callers of the diff
machinery, including "log -p" that repeatedly generates patches,
would however run just a single setup for the entire series of diff
invocations before tearing it down AFIAR, so leaking the result of
parsing the command line option may not be such a big deal to these
callers. But some callers added recently may not follow the access
pattern, in which case the machinery may have to be made more
leakproof.
Thanks.