This only surfaced as a regression after 2.36 release, but the
breakage was already there with us for at least a year.
The diff_free() call is to be used after we completely finished with
a diffopt structure. After "git diff A B" finishes producing
output, calling it before process exit is fine. But there are
commands that prepares diff_options struct once, compares two sets
of paths, releases resources that were used to do the comparison,
then reuses the same diff_option struct to go on to compare the next
two sets of paths, like "git log -p".
After "git log -p" finishes showing a single commit, calling it
before it goes on to the next commit is NOT fine. There is a
mechanism, the .no_free member in diff_options struct, to help "git
log" to avoid calling diff_free() after showing each commit and
instead call it just one. When the mechanism was introduced in
e900d494 (diff: add an API for deferred freeing, 2021-02-11),
however, we forgot to do the same to "diff-tree --stdin", which *is*
a moral equivalent to "git log".
During 2.36 release cycle, we started clearing the pathspec in
diff_free(), so programs like gitk that runs
git diff-tree --stdin -- <pathspec>
downstream of a pipe, processing one commit after another, started
showing irrelevant comparison outside the given <pathspec> from the
second commit. The same commit, by forgetting to teach the .no_free
mechanism, broke "diff-tree --stdin -I<regexp>" and nobody noticed
it for over a year, presumably because it is so seldom used an
option.
But <pathspec> is a different story. The breakage was very
prominently visible and was reported immediately after 2.36 was
released.
Fix this breakage by mimicking how "git log" utilizes the .no_free
member so that "diff-tree --stdin" behaves more similarly to "log".
Protect the fix with a few new tests.
Reported-by: Matthias Aßhauer <mha1993@live.de>
Helped-by: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Helped-by: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
f8781bfda3