From: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:36:02 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 03/12] meson.build: only set build variables for non-default values
Message-ID: <Z9rIQlUtutWPiPgD@pks.im>
In-Reply-To: <5d0112ae-98b5-46f2-91ad-35ed11358c3e@ramsayjones.plus.com>

On Sat, Mar 15, 2025 at 02:46:59AM +0000, Ramsay Jones wrote:
> 
> Some preprocessor -Defines have defaults sets in the source code when
> they have not been provided to the C compiler. In this case, there is
> no need to pass them on the command-line, unless the build requires a
> non-standard value.
> 
> The build variables for DEFAULT_EDITOR, DEFAULT_HELP_FORMAT along with
> DEFAULT_PAGER have appropriate defaults ('vi', 'man' and 'less') set in
> the code. Add the preprocessor -Defines to the 'libgit_c_args' only if
> the values set with the corresponding 'options' are different to these
> standard values.

Hm. Does this really change anything though? The behaviour before and
after this patch are exactly the same as far as I understand, and by
explicitly handling the defaults we basically have to hard-code more
assumptions. So in the current form I don't see that this patch adds
much.

What we _could_ be doing is to completely drop the default values in
"meson_options.txt". In that case we could instead compare whether we
saw the empty string, which allows us to stop encoding the default vaule
both in "meson_options.txt" and in "editor.c".

Patrick