Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 09:15:57PM -0800, Collin Funk wrote:

quoted

I generally don't like the casts like in rstrip_ref_components and
rstrip_ref_components because they force you to write this:

    free((char *)free_ptr);

And the const doesn't really benefit readability, in my opinion.

Agreed. It is especially egregious in this case because the const
variable is called to_free, and so its only purpose is to be non-const. ;)

quoted

That is a bit of a seperate topic than fixing the warning, though, so
I left them as-is.

It is a separate topic, but I feel like this is a good opportunity to
make this code less horrible. That is, there are some obvious
low-hanging cleanups that make the code more readable, and as a side
effect we clean up the const confusion. In such cases I think it is
worth veering off the path a little.

I was going to catalog the numerous flaws I found, but by the time I
explained them, I had basically written patches and commit messages. So
here is what I would propose instead. I hope I'm not stealing your
thunder nor knocking us too far off our goal.

No need to worry about stealing my thunder.

The first three I hope are no-brainers, and the final one fixes the
glibc const issue. The fourth is perhaps more risky.

  [1/4]: ref-filter: factor out refname component counting
  [2/4]: ref-filter: simplify lstrip_ref_components() memory handling
  [3/4]: ref-filter: simplify rstrip_ref_components() memory handling
  [4/4]: ref-filter: open-code slash search in rstrip_ref_components()

The cleanups look good and certainly make the code more understandable.

Also, I confirm that the last one fixes the glibc-2.43 warning.

Collin