Quoth Felipe Contreras on Apr 24 at 3:45 am: > On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:46 AM, Ali Polatel <a...@exherbo.org> wrote: > > 2012/4/24 Felipe Contreras <felipe.contre...@gmail.com>: > > >> Personally I don't see why an object, like say a query would remain > >> working correctly after the database is gone, either by calling > >> .close() directly, or just loosing the pointer to the original object. > >> I don't think users would expect that, or, even if they somehow found > >> it useful, that most likely would be very seldom, and hardly worth > >> worrying about it. > > > > Working correctly is not expected but wouldn't it be more appropriate > > to throw an exception rather than dumping core or printing on standard > > error? > > Sure, if that was possible. > > > I wonder whether we can make both work somehow. > > Maybe by using talloc explicitly and keeping reference pointers? > > I don't know whether it's worth bothering. > > Maybe, I don't see how, that's just not how C works. Maybe talloc does > have some way to figure out if a pointer has been freed, but I doubt > that, and I can't find it by grepping through the API. > > Another option would be hook into talloc's destructor so we know when > an object is freed and taint it, but then we would be overriding > notmuch's destructor, and there's no way around that (unless we tap > into talloc's internal structures). A way to workaround that would be > to modify notmuch's API so that we can specify a destructor for > notmuch objects, but that would be tedious, and I doubt a lof people > beside us would benefit from that.
I believe (though I might be wrong) that bindings could simply maintain their own talloc references to C objects returned by libnotmuch to prevent them from being freed until the wrapper object is garbage collected. This would require modifying all of the library's _destroy functions to use talloc_find_parent_bytype and talloc_unlink instead of simply calling talloc_free, but I don't think this change would be particularly invasive and it certainly wouldn't affect the library interface. _______________________________________________ notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org http://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch