Jeff Latimer lats@yless4u.com.au writes:
What is the policy for handling the dereferencing of pointers that have previously been determined to be NULL and an ERR message has been issued. It seems that there are many cases where Coverity has found that the test is made but the code falls through to the dereference. In a number of cases to a TRACE. Are we trying to throw an exception in these cases but assuming that the problem is unlikely and not worth further handling. Essentially, it seems that if this is the policy then we can mark the Coverity entries as ignore. In some cases it seems that the only problem may be the TRACE and there is no other reference which implies that an else may solve the problem ie.
if (!ptr) ERR "msg" else TRACE
That sort of code doesn't make much sense. Either a null pointer is valid input and it should be handled properly, or it isn't and there's no point in having an ERR, we might as well crash and get a full backtrace.