From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 16:24:48 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 33/67] read_branches_file: replace strcpy with xstrdup
Message-ID: <20150917162447.GA25837@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq7fnpkqdj.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 08:38:32AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > In some of the cases, as you've seen, I dug further in cleaning things
> > up. But in others I did the minimal fix (especially in this case, the
> > limitations are only about the deprecated "branches" and "remotes"
> > file), mostly to try to keep the scope of work sane.
> 
> That is sensible.  As long as the result of conversion is easier to
> audit (which is the primary focus of this series), I'd agree that we
> should stop there, instead of making further changes.
> 
> The last thing we would want to do is to change the behaviour,
> especially to unintentionally start rejecting what we have always
> accepted, while doing a "code clean-up".  Letting these sleeping
> dogs lie is the safest.  That various distros lag behind our release
> schedule means that we may not hear about regression until a year
> after we break it for a feature used by minority of users.

Yeah, that was my thinking. Since I _did_ end up doing the cleanup and
posted it earlier, please feel free to review and express an opinion on
the original versus the cleanup.

I'm on the fence.  I do think the cleaned-up version is much nicer, but
I always worry about the risk of touching little-used code.

-Peff