Re: Fix git-svn for SVN 1.7

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 31, 2012, 23:05 UTC
Message-ID: <7vtxwnh6qq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120731200108.GA14462@dcvr.yhbt.net>

Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> wrote:
>> It just doesn't matter.
>> 
>> Why are we arguing over which solution will be 4% better two years from now,
>> or if my commits are formatted perfectly, when tremendous amounts of basic
>> work to be done improving git-svn?  The code is undocumented, lacking unit
>> tests, difficult to understand and riddled with bugs.
>
> Yes it does matter.
>
> git-svn has the problems it has because it traditionally had lower
> review standards than the rest of git.  So yes, we're being more careful
> nowadays about the long-term ramifications of changes.

Thanks. I know it takes guts to publicly admit that over time your own creation has become less ideal than you wish it to be, but it needed to be said.

Michael, please realize that the only reason people comment on the patch series is because they care about what the series brings to us. In other words, your effort is appreciated. For a change that we want to have in our codebase, the functionality of the code immediately after the change is applied of course is important, but the maintainability of the result also matters.

We want to make sure that anybody who wants to understand and improve the system can read the code without distraction from inconsistent coding styles used in different sections of code. We want "git log" (or "git log git-svn.perl perl/") output to tell a coherent story about how the code evolved and why these changes are made in a consistent voice to the readers. We want people to be able to "git log | grep Signed-off-by:" to count the contributors.

A contributor has enough room to be creative in how his or her code is designed. Updating the code to follow the "convert as early as possible", and (during subsequent discussion with Eric) suggesting use of class instances instead of bare strings to make it harder to mistakenly use bare unconverted strings are two examples you already showed creativity in areas that matter.

There is no need to be creative in ChangeLog and coding styles; it only hurts maintainability.

Regarding the operator overloading of "eq" for comparing the converted strings, I still think it will hurt maintainablity (we want to make sure that it is harder, not easier, to make wrong changes to the code in the future), but I may be mistaken and you may have better ideas. If you can use overloading in such a way that it won't harm maintainability and yet makes the resulting code easier to read, I don't have any objection.

What I won't accept is "maintainability does not matter".  It does.

Thanks.