Re: [PATCH v7 1/5] command-list.txt: prepare with [commands] header

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 15, 2015, 20:44 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqmw15fu5m.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <5556582C.3010409@gmail.com>

Sébastien Guimmara  <sebastien.guimmara@gmail.com> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

>> This is largely just a "taste" thing, but with all these backslashes
>> in the supporting infrastructure you had to add in Makefiles and
>> scripts, don't you think the choice of the way you designed the
>> format to use '[commands]' was a rather poor one?  After all, all
>> you need is a clear separator line for a block of commands and
>> another block of groups, and there wasn't a reason why you needed to
>> use square brackets for that, and the sed scripts are suffering from
>> that poor choice.
>>
>> You could for example have used the existing "# List of known git
>> commands" as such a signal to tell that all the no comment lines
>> below are commands.
>
> I tend to think that relying on comments as marks for parsers is brittle,
> but indeed square brackets get in the way of sed regexes. I'll think of
> something better. Thanks.

Heh, we, and more importantly our users, already rely on a marker in comments when writing their commit log messages ;-)

I would not be opposed to a new header that is outside comment, but I do not think the marker line that is also a comment is "brittle" and would not be opposed to that, either.

    # do not molest the next line
    ### command list
    # name category
    git-add mainporcelain
    ...

would be perfectly acceptable.

I was just pointing out that you did not even have to have patch 1/5.

Thanks.