On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Tom Lane <[email protected]> wrote: > Robert Haas <[email protected]> writes: >> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Phil Sorber <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 10:52 PM, Tom Lane <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> I don't believe that callers should be trying to free() the result. >>>> Whether it's been strdup'd or not is not any of their business. > >>> Is that just because of the nature of this specific function? > >> I can't presume to speak for Tom, but I think so. Sometimes the API >> of a function includes the notion that the caller should pfree the >> result. Sometimes it doesn't. The advantage of NOT including that in >> the API contract is that you can sometimes do optimizations that would >> be impossible otherwise - e.g. you can return the same palloc'd string >> on successive calls to the function; or you can sometimes return a >> statically allocated string. > > Yeah. In this particular case, it seems rather obvious that the > function should be returning the same string each time --- if it's > actually doing a fresh malloc, that sounds like a bug.
It does, but it's noted in a comment that it's only expected to be run once. > > But in any case, adding or removing a const qualifier from a function's > result typically goes along with an API-contract change as to whether > the caller is supposed to free the result or not. My objection here > was specifically that I don't believe the contract for get_progname > includes caller-free now, and I don't want it to start being that. That's fair. Thanks for the explanation. > > regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list ([email protected]) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
