qapi: Change visit_type_FOO() to no longer return partial objects

Returning a partial object on error is an invitation for a careless
caller to leak memory.  We already fixed things in an earlier
patch to guarantee NULL if visit_start fails ("qapi: Guarantee
NULL obj on input visitor callback error"), but that does not
help the case where visit_start succeeds but some other failure
happens before visit_end, such that we leak a partially constructed
object outside visit_type_FOO(). As no one outside the testsuite
was actually relying on these semantics, it is cleaner to just
document and guarantee that ALL pointer-based visit_type_FOO()
functions always leave a safe value in *obj during an input visitor
(either the new object on success, or NULL if an error is
encountered), so callers can now unconditionally use
qapi_free_FOO() to clean up regardless of whether an error occurred.

The decision is done by adding visit_is_input(), then updating the
generated code to check if additional cleanup is needed based on
the type of visitor in use.

Note that we still leave *obj unchanged after a scalar-based
visit_type_FOO(); I did not feel like auditing all uses of
visit_type_Enum() to see if the callers would tolerate a specific
sentinel value (not to mention having to decide whether it would
be better to use 0 or ENUM__MAX as that sentinel).

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <1461879932-9020-25-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/qapi-code-gen.txt b/docs/qapi-code-gen.txt
index fe61c5c..d7d6987 100644
--- a/docs/qapi-code-gen.txt
+++ b/docs/qapi-code-gen.txt
@@ -905,6 +905,10 @@ Example:
         visit_check_struct(v, &err);
     out_obj:
         visit_end_struct(v);
+        if (err && visit_is_input(v)) {
+            qapi_free_UserDefOne(*obj);
+            *obj = NULL;
+        }
     out:
         error_propagate(errp, err);
     }
@@ -929,6 +933,10 @@ Example:
         }
 
         visit_end_list(v);
+        if (err && visit_is_input(v)) {
+            qapi_free_UserDefOneList(*obj);
+            *obj = NULL;
+        }
     out:
         error_propagate(errp, err);
     }