[pacman-dev] alpm_list_remove_dups: was - [PATCH] Sort and avoid duplicates in -Sii output

[Xavier Chantry]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'd rather have it not touch the original list. Even if it does modify
> the list, freeing items from the list could be disastrous in the case
> of packages or something, so that is a no-no. I could see it being a
> more useful function if it too took a comparison function and used
> that to decide whether two things were equal (passing it along to
> alpm_list_find).
>
> One option would be to make the signature look like this:
> alpm_list_t *alpm_list_remove_dupes(const alpm_list_t *list,
> alpm_list_fn_cmp fn, alpm_list_t **removed);
>
> This would, I think, allow for a variety of use cases. The function
> would work similar to what it does now, but use the comparator to
> determine whether things are equal and should be purged. In addition,
> by returning the removed items from the list, it would allow the
> calling site to determine what to do- e.g. free just the resulting
> removed list or free the list + items inside.
>

So we would need to call free_list on the original list passed as
argument, and free_list + free_list_inner on both the result returned
by alpm_list_remove_dupes and removed ?