Re: [PATCH] Supplant the "while case ... break ;; esac" idiom

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Sep 24, 2007, 06:22 UTC
Message-ID: <85ps08k2fj.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <7vhcllc9bz.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Ok, this is not really what we have been talking about except in
>> one case, but I think it is actually more of an improvement.
>
> Gaah, didn't I say I do NOT think it is an improvement?

Ah, but I am not presuming to speak for you in my commit message and postings.

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>> I consider breaking out of the condition instead of the
>> body od the loop ugly,
>
> Well, as we all know that we disagree on this point, stating
> what you consider one-sidedly here is quite inappropriate.

Hm. If I create a patch after you basically said "go ahead, I don't mind, but I consider it unimportant", how am I going to put the motivation for the patch in the commit message while expressing _your_ opinion? I thought that using "I" to make clear that it is my personal view would be doing that.

So what am I supposed to write instead?

"There is no good reason for this patch, but we might as well do it."?

>> and the implied "true" value of the non-matching case is not really
>> obvious to humans at first glance.
>
> It is more like "if you do not know shell".

It is more to take in.  Believe me, I do know shell.

> In other words, I am somewhat disgusted with the first part of
> your proposed commit log message, although I like what the patch
> does ;-).

Could you propose a commit message that would be acceptable to you, yet not make it appear like a mistake to actually commit the patch?

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>> -while case "$#" in 0) break ;; esac
>> +while test "$#" != 0
>>  do
>>      case "$1" in
>>      -a)
>
> And let's not quote "$#".

I kept this as it was originally. Some authors prefer to quote every shell variable as a rule in order to avoid stupid syntactic things happening. Of course, $# never needs quoting, but I did not want to change the personal style of the respective authors. I can make this consistent if you want to.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum