From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:33:45 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH v3] merge-base: teach "git merge-base" to accept more than 2 arguments
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0807281328520.2725@eeepc-johanness>
In-Reply-To: <20080728065023.743930d6.chriscool@tuxfamily.org>

Hi,

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Christian Couder wrote:

> +	rev = xmalloc((argc - 1) * sizeof(*rev));
> +
> +	do {
> +		struct commit *r = get_commit_reference(argv[1]);
> +		if (!r)
> +			return 1;
> +		rev[rev_nr++] = r;
> +		argc--; argv++;
> +	} while (argc > 1);
> +
> +	return show_merge_base(rev, rev_nr, show_all);

	rev = xmalloc((argc - 1) * sizeof(*rev));

	for (rev_nr = 0; rev_nr + 1 < argc; rev_nr++) {
		rev[rev_nr] = get_commit_reference(argv[rev_nr + 1]);
		if (!rev[rev_nr])
			return !!error("Does not refer to a commit: '%s'",
				argv[rev_nr + 1]);
	}

	return show_merge_base(rev, rev_nr, show_all);

I do not know about you, but I think this is not only shorter (in spite of 
adding a helpful error message), but also simpler to understand (not using 
convoluted do { } while logic), and therefore superior.

Your performance argument is weak IMHO, as this is not a big performance 
hit, and command line parameter parsing is definitely not performance 
critical.

Ciao,
Dscho