[pacman-dev] [BUG] alpm_list_remove need an initalized pointer for void **data

[Xavier]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:10 PM, solsTiCe d'Hiver
<solstice.dhiver at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Or what do we do here? Double pointers start confusing me.
> i reach here the limit of my knowlegde of C too.
>
> but why not :
> if(data) {
>    data = NULL;
> }
>
> if have found by trial and error that's the only thing that is not seg
> faulting
>
> and
> void **data;
> data=NULL;
> is the same than
> void **data=NULL;
>

If you do that and then call list_remove like this :
alpm_list_remove(..., data);
Then it is the same than alpm_list_remove(...,NULL);
So what is the point?
In this case, the list_remove can't give us back a pointer to the removed node.
We don't want data to be NULL, we want it to be a valid address, where
the list_remove function will be able to store something.

I already gave you the usual way to provide that, used everywhere in
pacman/libalpm, which is to define void *data (a pointer), and then
give &data (the address of that pointer) as a parameter.

If you insist on using a void **data (a pointer to another pointer)
and passing data as a parameter, then you need the data value to be a
valid memory address.
If you let it undefined, it has usually some random value. And when
you try to use that value as an address, by using *data, then boom,
segfault. That is when you need malloc. malloc will allocate some
memory and return a pointer to that allocated memory. data is then a
valid memory address and *data can be used.

Here is a more fun explanation :
http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/104/