[vtkusers] SmartPointer questions

[David Doria]

1) Smart pointers when not allocating memory (using New())
Given the below context, does it make sense to make polydata a smart
pointer? Or is the actual memory released when the reader goes out of
scope so a normal polydata pointer is the "right" thing to do?

vtkSmartPointer<vtkXMLPolyDataReader> reader =
vtkSmartPointer<vtkXMLPolyDataReader>::New();
reader->SetFileName(InputFilename.c_str());
reader->Update();

//the question is which of these to use?
vtkPolyData* polydata = reader->GetOutput(); //normal pointer
vtkSmartPointer<vtkPolyData> polydata = reader->GetOutput(); //smart pointer

2) What happens if you accidentally do this:
vtkSmartPointer<vtkXMLPolyData> polydata = vtkPolyData::New();
(vtkSmartPointer<> is missing on the rvalue)

It seems to behave just like as if you had not used a smart pointer at
all - the object does not get automatically deleted when it goes out
of scope. So this is just assigning a normal pointer to a smart
pointer variable? Can that be caught to produce a warning/error? Or is
there any case in which you would want to do something like this? Is
this exactly the same thing that is going on in the first question?

Thanks,

David