RIF: org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.ReturnVal frees returns value

[Frederic Heem]

Dbus freeing the return value has at least 2 problems:
* If the application returns a static buffer, the application will crash when dbus frees the static buffer.
* The malloc/free mismatch: the application could use its own allocation mechanism and the free function that dbus uses cannot know how to deallocate the memory. This is a common problem with plugin based application. 
If dbus really wants to free the return value, first it has to be clearly documented, then it has to provide an api to set the delete function to use when deleting the memory, an application would have to tell dbus which delete function to use.



-----Messaggio originale-----
Da:	Havoc Pennington [mailto:hp at redhat.com]
Inviato:	ven 15/09/2006 18.41
A:	Frederic Heem
Cc:	dbus at lists.freedesktop.org
Oggetto:	Re: org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.ReturnVal frees returns value

frederic heem wrote:
> 
> sniffer_get allocates the string, stores it as the key value in a hash table 
> and return the pointer to the string. Valgrind found that dbus is freeing the 
> return value ?  
> Dbus must not free memory an application has allocated because there could be 
> a mismatch malloc/free between the application and libdbus. 
> 

If the return value were not freed, then the application would always 
have to keep it around indefinitely, even if it was some on-the-fly 
created string with no reason to store it.

If it's copied, then there's an abstraction barrier where the app is 
welcome to store it or create it on the fly. This is the standard 
glib/gtk API convention used in most of glib/gtk unless the returned 
string is in some way inherently already stored.

Just add a g_strdup().

Havoc





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