Re: [PATCH/RFC] Makefile: dedup list of files obtained from ls-files

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Apr 24, 2019, 17:19 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cSU5L2NDgMPJ4PG2nd8j9=Pe_LXxukDsFmZTiV2wf-4EA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20190424112550.GC8695@szeder.dev>

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 7:26 AM SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On second thought, however, I'm not sure that such a '--dedup' option
> would be all that useful in the above cases.  If the users have to
> adjust their 'git ls-files' invocation by specifying '--dedup' to
> avoid the same paths listed multiple times, then they might just as
> well remove the redundant options.  After all, a deleted file is
> inherently modified, and a modified file is inherently cached...

As a person who rarely, if ever, uses git-ls-files, I'm having trouble understanding why de-duping isn't the default behavior when the listing is otherwise not annotated (that is, when -t/-v/-f/--debug are not used). Are consumers of an unannotated list able to derive any additional useful information from the duplicate entries? If consumers can't derive anything useful, then the duplication seems more an accident of implementation (for the unannotated case) than a planned feature, thus could be considered a bug worth fixing. And, the fix would be to de-dup by default when unannotated, thus no need for a --dedup option. (As for backward-compatibility concerns, I imagine that existing consumers either don't care about the duplication or already manually de-dup, but perhaps I'm not seeing the larger picture.)