Re: [PATCH v2 1/6] Makefile: remove "all" on "$(FUZZ_OBJS)"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 4, 2021, 06:51 UTC
Message-ID: <YBuZVfnc0ECuoKkK@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20210201111715.10200-2-avarab@gmail.com>

On Mon, Feb 01, 2021 at 12:17:10PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Adding this as a dependency was intentionally done in
> 5e472150800 (fuzz: add basic fuzz testing target., 2018-10-12).
> 
> I don't see why we need to prevent bitrot here under "all" for these
> in particular, but not e.g. contrib/credential/**/*.c
> 
> In any case, these files are rather trivial and from their commit log
> it seems the fuzz-all target is run by a few people already.

Part of me wants to love this commit, because I don't care about the fuzz code (since I don't run it myself[1]).

But looking at "git log fuzz-*.c", I do think it will lead to bitrot. Many of those commits are things that do not care about fuzzing, but were just fixing up function interfaces as we go (e.g., my c8828530b, though see [2]).

The difference between contrib/credential/ and this is that those credential helpers do not rely on the rest of the source. They are independent programs that can be built totally out of tree.

So I dunno. This puts the responsibility for fixing bitrot onto the people who actually use them, which is nice. But often times it is easier for the person making the original change to just fix them up along with the others (because they understand the point of the change better, and also because a bunch of rot doesn't accrue over time).

-Peff

[1] I just ran "make fuzz-all", and it barfed at the link step. It looks
    like I need to specify a bunch of llvm stuff manually. So no, I'd
    guess not a lot of people are running this. :)

[2] That one is particularly egregious because it fixed a copy-pasted
    version of a public function header. Yuck.