On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 09:41:25AM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote: > On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 7:44 PM, Junio C Hamano <gits...@pobox.com> wrote: > > Stefan Beller <sbel...@google.com> writes: > > > >> (I note this as you regard your patches as a lunch time hack > >> in the cooking email; I am serious about these patches though.) > > > > We do not want to touch borrowed code unnecessarily. Are these > > lines and bits hampering further progress we are actively trying to > > make right now? > > No they are not, you are correct. > > I differ in opinion on 'borrowed code'. The latest release of xdiff > (v0.23) was in Nov 13, 2008 according to > http://freecode.com/projects/xdiff-lib > or on March 23, 2006 according to https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/LibXDiff > and given that we incorporated so many changes already to xdiff, > I would argue it is sufficiently different from the original, we'll probably > never import another upstream version (if there will be a release at all). > > So the code was rather taken and now we are the bag holders in > maintaining it, so we can make it pretty even only for the sake of > pleasing ourselves (or rather: not confusing ourselves with too > many unused flags).
Yes, I'd agree. For what it's worth both sides of this argument played out in my head when I saw your patches, and I ended up at the same "we are the bag holders" place. And there's certainly precedent for touching that code and cleaning it up to make it easier to work with (just look at at "git log -p xdiff"). I don't know that I would support a full-scale rewrite (for the same reason that I wouldn't on the rest of the code base -- avoiding churn). But deleting unused bits seems like an easy win for readability. -Peff
