Subject: Re: [PATCH] blame.c: fix garbled error message

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:54:27 -0500

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 04:11:06PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > As an aside, I have often been tempted to have xstrdup silently
> > propagate a NULL. It would have been the right thing to do here, but
> > maybe there are cases where the segfault is preferable for catching a
> > mistake early (otherwise you might store the NULL and then segfault much
> > later).
> 
> Great minds think alike.  The sentence after "but maybe ..." was
> what I had in mind as a response in anticipation that somebody might
> suggest that; a separate xstrdup_or_null() might be fine, but I'd
> rather not to have xstrdup() that is _too_ magical.

Yeah. Of course, it is not _that_ many more characters to do a ternary
conditional. I guess the main benefit is that you do not have to repeat
the name of the variable (which lets you reuse a function result
directly, avoiding an explicit temporary).

Here's my attempt. Some cases are a little nicer, but overall, it does
not feel significantly more readable to me. I dunno. I could go either
way. I stuck Lukas's patch on top (modified to use xstrdup_or_null), if
we do want to go that route. Otherwise it needs the ?: treatment.

  [1/5]: git-compat-util: add xstrdup_or_null helper
  [2/5]: builtin/apply.c: use xstrdup_or_null instead of null_strdup
  [3/5]: builtin/commit.c: use xstrdup_or_null instead of envdup
  [4/5]: use xstrdup_or_null to replace ternary conditionals
  [5/5]: blame.c: fix garbled error message