Re: Git in Outreachy?

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 19, 2020, 07:40 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD1BxnOk4-gaUQb9bY5zhAtD8Jy-x0RC=pNMSQvUaVxRmg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.2009162206580.56@tvgsbejvaqbjf.bet>

Hi Dscho,

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 10:27 PM Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Sep 2020, Christian Couder wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> > To summarize more, it seems to me that only the following scripts
> > could be worth converting:
> >
> > git-difftool--helper.sh
> > git-mergetool--lib.sh
> > git-mergetool.sh
> >
> > I wonder if they are really worth converting though, as they should
> > probably all be converted together and we would likely also need to
> > convert the scripts in mergetools/ at the same time. And then there
> > should be a way to still easily configure things for users. So perhaps
> > a better way to approach this would be first to convert the scripts in
> > mergetools/ into config files.
>
> The biggest problem is that they're all entangled.
> `git-difftool--helper.sh` sources `git-mergetool--lib.sh` and uses quite a
> bit of its machinery.

Yeah, I agree this is an issue.

> As to converting the scripts to config files, I'd rather have them
> hard-coded in the source code.

I am not sure what are the pros and cons of hardcoding vs config files in this case.

My opinion is that config files would make it easier for people to contribute what's needed for new tools, while hardcoding might make it more easily extensible for us and might reduce backward compatibility issues.

> I would then probably try to implement the bare minimum for the
> `difftool--helper` command to work (re-implementing in C only the parts of
> `mergetool--lib` that are necessary), and only in a next patch series work
> on `mergetool`.

Thanks for your opinion on this. For now I think it needs to be discussed more before we could suggest it as a project.

Best, Christian.