The "struct name_path" data is examined in only two places:
we generate it in process_tree(), and we convert it to a
single string in path_name(). Everyone else just passes it
through to those functions.
We can further note that process_tree() already keeps a
single strbuf with the leading tree path, for use with
tree_entry_interesting().
Instead of building a separate name_path linked list, let's
just use the one we already build in "base". This reduces
the amount of code (especially tricky code in path_name()
which did not check for integer overflows caused by deep
or large pathnames).
It is also more efficient in some instances. Any time we
were using tree_entry_interesting, we were building up the
strbuf anyway, so this is an immediate and obvious win
there. In cases where we were not, we trade off storing
"pathname/" in a strbuf on the heap for each level of the
path, instead of two pointers and an int on the stack (with
one pointer into the tree object). On a 64-bit system, the
latter is 20 bytes; so if path components are less than that
on average, this has lower peak memory usage. In practice
it probably doesn't matter either way; we are already
holding in memory all of the tree objects leading up to each
pathname, and for normal-depth pathnames, we are only
talking about hundreds of bytes.
This patch leaves "struct name_path" as a thin wrapper
around the strbuf, to avoid disrupting callbacks. We should
fix them, but leaving it out makes this diff easier to view.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>