Re: xfree() -- set ptr to nil (fwd)

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain <chastain at cygnus dot com>]

John Moore writes:

> Ok, then, do we want to replace xfree() with something like XFREE() ?

This gets into a philosophical discussion.  Here is my philosophy.
Others may differ.

Basically, I am interested in work that leads to patches that get applied
and have concrete, observable gains.  If someone can identify specific
bugs that we've had in gdb as a result of xfree problems, then I would
be interested in safety work such as s/xfree/XFREE/g, arranging to run
gdb regularly under Purify, and projects like that.

But I haven't seen problems like that so s/xfree/XFREE/g does not appeal
to me.

This is just a guideline.  I really liked Kevin Buettner's PARAMS removal
patches, for example.  In that case, the code afterwards was uneqivocally
simpler than the code before.

My two cents.  And I'm not a maintainer, just a write-after-approval guy.

Michael Elizabeth Chastain
<chastain@redhat.com>
"love without fear"