> From: Gary Winiger <gww at eng.sun.com>
> > Bart Blanquart wrote:
> > > On 02/25/09 22:09, Scott Rotondo wrote:
> > > > Bart Blanquart wrote:
> > > >> Current webrev at http://cr.opensolaris.org/~bartbl/6251549-20090225/
> > > >
> > > > This is OK, but it would also work fine if you get rid of strdup() and
> > > > the corresponding free() at line 136.
> > >
> > > Yeah, but that makes things more fragile. A later call to getpw*() could
> > > change the username being processed.
> >
> > Since we know the only such calls in this program are in get_username(),
> > I would get rid of the strdup(). However, I don't feel strongly enough
> > to insist on this point.
>
> I feel a lot stronger than Scott on this point. IMO, it is misleading
> to future maintainers. It also overly complicates the code, again
> misleading future maintainers.
I'd take this as a matter of style. To me, the interface as defined is
much simpler for future maintainers: rather than returning a static
value which the caller is responsible for protecting against calls to
getpw*(), it returns a string which the caller is responsible for
deallocating. The latter model strikes me as simpler to describe and
enforce.
-JZ
