A question about return value policies

[jonghwanhyeon]

If a return type of a method is char * or const char *, which policy return_value_policy::automatic does use? return_value_policy::take_ownership or return_value_policy::copy?
If it uses return_value_policy::take_ownership, does it mean that pybind11 tries to free() the returned char *?

In addition, as I understood, return_value_policy::automatic is return_value_policy::take_ownership if the return type is a pointer. So I had some experiments as follows:

Case A

py::class_<MeCab::Node>(m, "Node")
  .def_readwrite("prev", &MeCab::Node::prev)
  .def_readwrite("next", &MeCab::Node::next)
;

node = lattice.bos_node()
while node is not None:
    print(node)
    node = node.next

(venv) jonghwanhyeon@2dc3712e4134:~/workspace/python-mecab-ko/mecab/pybind$ python3 test.py 
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f840d665430>
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f840d668db0>
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f840d6654b0>
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f840d66e170>
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f840d66e1b0>
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f840d66e1f0>

Case B

Then, I explicitly added return_value_policy::take_ownership

py::class_<MeCab::Node>(m, "Node")
  .def_readwrite("prev", &MeCab::Node::prev, py::return_value_policy::take_ownership)
  .def_readwrite("next", &MeCab::Node::next, py::return_value_policy::take_ownership)
;

node = lattice.bos_node()
while node is not None:
    print(node)
    node = node.next

(venv) jonghwanhyeon@2dc3712e4134:~/workspace/python-mecab-ko/mecab/pybind$ python3 test.py 
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f837c7380f0>
<_mecab.Node object at 0x7f837c7380b0>
Segmentation fault (core dumped)