Re: Alternative approach to the git config NULL value checking patches..

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 10, 2008, 22:08 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0802101406560.2896@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vir0wfqrz.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> I should have mentioned the reason why I did not suggest doing
> it this way in my [Janitor] message.
> 
> It is not "suttle difference between true and empty".  Empty
> means false, and with this approach, it switches the meaning of
> valueless form of config to quite the opposite.

No it does not.

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> will now need to be changed to:
> 
> 	if (value == config_true)
>         	Ah we have true;
> 	else if (!*value)
>         	Ok this is false;

And that was done by my patch.

Show 6 quoted lines

> still need to be fixed to:
> 
> 	if (value == config_true)
>         	die("oops '%s' is not a bool", var);
> 	else if (!strcmp(value, "somevalue")
> 		Ok let's use somevalue;

And this is different from checking against NULL exactly how?

Show 8 quoted lines

> > This also means that code (notably the value regexp parsing) that does 
> > something like
> >
> > 	value ? value : ""
> >
> > just automatically can go away, and just use 'value' directly.
> 
> Yes, but that's broken already, isn't it?

No, it was what the regex parsing logic was - empty matches empty. Whether we really want it or not, I dunno.

		Linus