On Wed, Jun 17, 2026 at 01:02:23PM -0500, Justin Tobler wrote:

On 26/06/15 03:56PM, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

quoted

When creating reference stores we register them with the "chdir_notify"
subsystem. This is required because some of the paths we track may be
relative paths, so we have to reparent them in case the current working
directory changes.

But while we register the reference stores, we never unregister them.
This can have multiple outcomes:

  - For a repository's main reference database we essentially keep the
    pointer alive. We never free that database, either, and our leak
    checker doesn't notice because it's still registered.

  - For submodule and worktree reference databases we do eventually free
    them in `repo_clear()`, so we may keep pointers to free'd memory
    registered. We never notice though as we don't tend to chdir around
    in the middle of the process.

We never noticed either of these symptoms, but they are obviously bad.

Partially fix those issues by unregistering the reference stores when
releasing them. The leak of the main reference database will be fixed in
a subsequent commit.

Note that this requires us to use `chdir_notify_register()` instead of
`chdir_notify_reparent()`, as there is no infrastructure to unregister the
latter. It ultimately doesn't matter much though: in a subsequent commit
we'll drop this infrastructure completely. We merely require this step
here so that we can fix the memory leaks ahead of time.

Since this version of the series dropped the last patch which stopped
using `chdir_notify_reparent()`, does the log message here need to be
updated?

True, will do.

Patrick