On Sat, Aug 02, 2008 at 07:46:49PM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
On Sat, 2 Aug 2008, brian m. carlson wrote:Package: libncurses5 Version: 5.6+20080713-1 Severity: normal According to valgrind, libncurses5 allocates approximately 118k that is never freed:from INSTALL: --disable-leaks For testing, compile-in code that frees memory that normally would not be freed, to simplify analysis of memory-leaks. Any implementation of curses must not free the memory associated with a screen, since (even after calling endwin()), it must be available for use in the next call to refresh(). There are also chunks of memory held for performance reasons. That makes it hard to analyze curses applications for memory leaks. To work around this, build a debugging version of the ncurses library which frees those chunks which it can, and provides the _nc_free_and_exit() function to free the remainder on exit. The ncurses utility and test programs use this feature, e.g., via the ExitProgram() macro.
This isn't really a solution unless the libncurses5 package is built with it. It's great that you considered this problem and built in an option to fix it, but it's not compiled into the Debian package, and so the Debian package leaks memory. Shared libraries aren't supposed to do that. I personally don't believe refresh is required to work after a delwin(stdscr), since Calling delwin deletes the named window, freeing all memory associated with it.... except that it doesn't free all the memory associated with it. It does free *some* of it, but not all. I don't see any possible objection to freeing all the related memory in this case, since calling refresh would invoke undefined behavior. -- brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US +1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only troff on top of XML: http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc/code/thwack OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187
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