In general, it's fine to pass %NULL to g_free().
However, consider:
char *
foo (void)
{
gs_free char *value = NULL;
value = g_strdup ("hi");
return g_steal_pointer (&value);
}
gs_free, gs_local_free(), and g_steal_pointer() are all inlinable.
Here the compiler can easily recognize that we always pass %NULL to
g_free(). But with the previous implementation, the compiler would
not omit the call to g_free().
Similar patterns happen all over the place:
gboolean
baz (void)
{
gs_free char *value = NULL;
if (!some_check ())
return FALSE;
value = get_value ();
if (!value)
return FALSE;
return TRUE;
}
in this example, g_free() is only required after setting @value to
non-NULL.
Note that this does increase the binary side a bit (4k for libnm, 8k
for NetworkManager, with "-O2").
We already had nm_free_secret() to clear the secret out
of a NUL terminated string. That works well for secrets
which are strings, it can be used with a cleanup attribute
(nm_auto_free_secret) and as a cleanup function for a
GBytes.
However, it does not work for secrets which are binary.
For those, we must also track the length of the allocated
data and clear it.
Add two new structs NMSecretPtr and NMSecretBuf to help
with that.
