FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT freetds.org>]

FreeTDS 0.63 has been scanned by Coverity.  David Maxwell, Coverity's Open
Source Strategist, whom I met in Barcelona this weekend, kindly promoted
FreeTDS to the top of his queue.  The scan reports 59 errors, including
among others passing a NULL pointer, dereferencing NULL pointers, and
failing to free resources. 

In my first pass over the list, I found nothing terrible.  I guess about
half are laziness and half errors, some under improbable conditions.  Some
are very complex to find; the analysis is very impressive.  I didn't see
anything hard to fix.  

As of now, I am the only project member with an account.  If you would
like to devote some time to improving FreeTDS's quality by correcting
these errors, I could arrange an account for you, too.  (It may take time
because there's no automated system.)  Just let me know.  

You may wonder why Coverity chose to scan 0.63 instead of CVS HEAD.  The
reason is that Coverity has chosen to use pkgsrc (www.pkgsrc.org) as a
framework for building and scanning software.  Pkgsrc makes it easier for
anyone, including Coverity, to build free software.  It happens that
pkgsrc is running a little behind and still has 0.63 as its basis.  I will
try to get a more recent version in pkgsrc (in particular because new code
is more likely to contain error, ego notwithstanding), but from looking at
the scan, it's clear many of these bugs remain in the current codebase.  

Your humble maintainer, 

--jkl