Re: [gpsd-dev] [PATCH 2/2] hacking: mention strdup in the no-malloc section.

[Fred Wright]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2016, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> To avoid having to pedabtically overspecify these edge cases we can say
> that (a) if it requres a mabual free(), we don't use it, and (b) use of other
> malloc callers is considered potentially harmful and has to be explicitly
> approved during review.

One way to look at it is that the problem isn't malloc() - it's free().
In any circumstance where it's reasonable to *intentionally* call malloc()
without free(), then there's no risk of a memory leak. :-) Also, blaming
it on free() covers things like strdup(), which mention needing to free()
the result at some point.

Fred Wright