Re: [PATCH] bisect: fix handling of `help` and invalid subcommands
- From
Ruoyu Zhong <zhongruoyu@outlook.com>
- Date
- Oct 22, 2025, 20:20 UTC
- Message-ID
- <E1128C6E-C711-4742-B6C9-C3CD487CE4E6@outlook.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <xmqqwm4myetn.fsf@gitster.g>
Hi Junio,
I appreciate your detailed and thoughtful analysis and I resonate with your points. Specifically:
Show 7 quoted lines
> I also wonder if it would be cleaner to add "help" as a genuine > subcommand to the options[] table just like all the other > subcommands. The above would not be needed if we did so. But I do > not see huge upside for doing so (i.e., a single strcmp() with a > call like we see above, vs. a new helper function to make the same > call, to usage_with_options()), so what is written in this patch is > perfectly fine.
Agreed. Will keep this as is, as I also mentioned in my response to Ben.
Show 31 quoted lines
>> set_terms(&terms, "bad", "good");
>> get_terms(&terms);
>> - if (check_and_set_terms(&terms, argv[0]))
>> + if (check_and_set_terms(&terms, argv[0]) ||
>> + !one_of(argv[0], terms.term_good, terms.term_bad, NULL))
>> usage_msg_optf(_("unknown command: '%s'"), git_bisect_usage,
>> options, argv[0]);
>
> This change is a bit hard to reason about, so let me think aloud.
>
> If we were saying "git bisect olde" after somehow changing bad/good
> to newe/olde, then we do not want to say "unknown command", and the
> way it avoids that is to see if the given command is one of the
> terms check_and_set_terms() have updated.
>
> In other words, if argv[0] caused check_and_set_terms() to return
> non-zero, we do not have to do "unknown command", because the helper
> would have issued a warning already. When it returns 0, it may be
> because it saw a valid command "skip", etc. that cannot be a custom
> good/bad/new/old (in which case our one_of() would be false and we
> end up saying "unknown command"---have I just spot a bug???), or we
> haven't set custom terms and argv[0] is one of bad/good/new/old (in
> which case our one_of() would be true and we avoid saying "unknown
> command").
>
> And it turns out that my finding about the 'skip' etc. is not a bug,
> as these valid commands that cannot be good/bad/new/old aliases are
> already caught by parse_options() call and we know argv[0] is not
> such a valid subcommand.
>
> So after all this looks good.Thank you for walking through this. This is very helpful and also matches my own thought process when I first looked at it. The key is that this part of the code is only reached if fn is still NULL after parse_options, i.e., argv[0] is not one of the known subcommands.
Regards, Ruoyu