# HG changeset patch # User Siddharth Agarwal # Date 2015-04-06 17:46:44 # Node ID 6f0e6fa9fdd700807fe252a4caa9191b05e5fe0f # Parent 2262d7bc469edf95a6c58c4833e8474a20a95281 dirs._addpath: don't mutate Python strings after exposing them (issue4589) One of the rules of Python strings is that they're immutable. dirs._addpath breaks this assumption for performance, which is fine as long as it is done safely -- once a string is no longer internal-only it shouldn't be mutated. Unfortunately, we weren't being safe here -- we were mutating 'key' even after adding it to a dictionary. This only really affects other C code that reads strings, so it's somewhat hard to write a test for this without poking into the internal representation of the string via ctypes or similar. There is currently no C code that reads the output of the string, but there will likely be some soon as the bug indicates. There's no significant difference in performance. diff --git a/mercurial/dirs.c b/mercurial/dirs.c --- a/mercurial/dirs.c +++ b/mercurial/dirs.c @@ -93,11 +93,11 @@ static int _addpath(PyObject *dirs, PyOb if (ret == -1) goto bail; - if (pos != 0) - PyString_AS_STRING(key)[pos] = '/'; - else - key = NULL; - Py_CLEAR(key); + /* Clear the key out since we've already exposed it to Python + and can't mutate it further. key's refcount is currently 2 so + we can't just use Py_CLEAR. */ + Py_DECREF(key); + key = NULL; } ret = 0;