On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 09:00:12AM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > There are a few possible options: > > 1. Instead of a variable, we could just construct an artificial > sentinel address like "1", "-1", etc. I think these technically > fall afoul of the C standard (even if we do not access them, even > constructing invalid pointers is not always allowed). But it's also > something we do elsewhere, and even happens in some standard > interfaces (e.g., mmap()'s MMAP_FAILED value). It does involve some > annoying casts, though. > > 2. We can mark it as static. That gives it a definite value, but > perhaps makes people wonder if the static-ness is important, when > it's not. > > 3. We can just give it a value to shut the compiler up, even though > nobody cares about that value. > > I went with (3) here as the smallest and most obvious change. > > Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> > --- > I dunno, maybe the comment just makes things more mysterious and > doing the casts would make it more clear what is going on. Hmm, I guess one other option I did not consider: we could just drop the "const". The pointers to it are "const char *", but it is fine for them to point to a non-const variable. Maybe that is less mysterious. -Peff
