Re: [PATCH 8/8] diff: improve positioning of add/delete blocks in diffs

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 13, 2016, 15:59 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqoa4wu0bm.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160813085904.lykoihh4v2lf4yuj@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

> So assuming everything I just said isn't complete bollocks, I think we
> can move to a future where nobody uses the compaction heuristic. And
> there are three ways to deal with that:
>
>   1. The knob and feature stay. It might be useful for somebody who
>      wants to experiment in the future.
>
>   2. The knob and feature go away completely. It was an experiment, but
>      now we have something more useful.
>
>   3. The feature goes away, but the knob stays as noop, or maybe as an
>      alias for the indent heuristic, just because we did ship a version
>      that accepts "--compaction-heuristic", and maybe somebody somewhere
>      put it in a script?
>
> I think I'd be in favor of (2).

I am all for (2) [*1*]

This and the previous "take a blank line as a hint" are both heuristics. As long as the resulting code does not tax runtime performance visibly and improves the resulting output 99% of the time, there is no reason to leave end-users a knob. "Among 9 hunks in this patch that touch hello.c, 7 are made much more readable but 2 are worse" cannot even be helped with a command line option.

[Footnote]

*1* I am also strongly against (3), if only to teach people a
    lesson ;-).