malloc() with out free() in popt (2.4.7pre)

[Martin Pool]

On 13 Aug 2001, "John E. Malmberg" <malmberg at Encompasserve.org> wrote:
> I am still chasing this down, but in doing the build for OpenVMS,
> 
> I have discovered that one of the popt modules is using HAVE_ALLOCA_H
> to determine if the alloca function is on a platform.
> 
> That is not a good assumption.  Compaq C does have an alloca() built in
> (slightly different symbol name, I assume because of symbol naming rules
> in the C standard.)
> 
> Because alloca is a non-standard extension, if present it may not be in
> an alloca.h header, it could be in a different header.
> 
> HAVE_ALLOCA_H should only decide if the code should #include <alloca.h>.
> 
> HAVE_ALLOCA should decide if the alloca built-in equivalent function 
> should be used.
> 
> The more serious apparent bug, is that malloc() is being substituted for
> alloca() in the case that alloca.h is not present.

OK, good catch.
 
> No free() call seems to be done.
> 
> Therefore the memory malloc() is lost until the program exits.

Since popt is only called once (conceptually) at startup, I'd expect
it to use a small, fixed amount of memory.  I could be wrong.  

We should run under ccmalloc sometime.  That would be entertaining.  

The build farm already runs rsync under Insure++, but the test suite
doesn't give it much exercise.

-- 
Martin