Re: [PATCH] pretty: avoid buffer overflow in format_person_part

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> A more ideal solution would be for mailmap to grow an
> interface that:
>
>   1. Takes a pointer and length combination, instead of
>      assuming a NUL-terminated string.
>
>   2. Returns a pointer to the mailmap's allocated string,
>      rather than copying it into the buffer.

I was looking at René's patch to refs codepath that converted some "we
allocate because callee wants to have NUL-terminated strings" functions to
take counted strings (or whatever we want to call it---perhaps "string
slices"?), and it appears that we may benefit if more callers that do not
have to own strings that comes to them used them instead of NUL-terminated
strings as their interface.  At some deep point near the leaf of the
callchain, they may need to be converted in order to call external API
(read: POSIX) that takes NUL-terminated strings, but internal callchain
like the mailmap one, if done carefully, should let us avoid extra
allocations.