Re: [Libvir] [PATCH] deep copy dom structure

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 11:00:56AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > The 'conn', 'dom' and 'net' fields in a virterror can't be accessed > safely, particularly from a garbage-collected language. The only safe > thing one could do with them is a physical equality test on the > pointer against an existing conn/dom/net pointer. > > But the solution isn't to copy the dom object, since in a GC-d > language someone could grab a handle to the copied dom which would > have a different lifetime from the error object. If anything the > solution would be to remove those fields from the error object since > they are highly unlikely to be useful in any real world application. > We can't do this because of backwards compatibility promises but we > should instead deprecate them. We should at the very least NULL-ify the dom/net fields in the Error object associated with the Connection when we free the Domain/Network object.

We also probably need to re-arrange the remote daemon code a little so that it serializes to XDR format before the Domain/Network object are free'd. I agree that deep copying isn't the answer here & messes up the reference counting and will cause potential memory leaks.