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From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
To: Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>
Cc: Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com>,
	git@vger.kernel.org, robbat2@gentoo.org,
	bwalton@artsci.utoronto.ca, jrnieder@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Fix git-svn for SVN 1.7
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:05:01 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <7vtxwnh6qq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20120731200108.GA14462@dcvr.yhbt.net> (Eric Wong's message of "Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:01:08 +0000")

Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> writes:

> Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> wrote:
>> It just doesn't matter.
>> 
>> Why are we arguing over which solution will be 4% better two years from now,
>> or if my commits are formatted perfectly, when tremendous amounts of basic
>> work to be done improving git-svn?  The code is undocumented, lacking unit
>> tests, difficult to understand and riddled with bugs.
>
> Yes it does matter.
>
> git-svn has the problems it has because it traditionally had lower
> review standards than the rest of git.  So yes, we're being more careful
> nowadays about the long-term ramifications of changes.

Thanks.  I know it takes guts to publicly admit that over time your
own creation has become less ideal than you wish it to be, but it
needed to be said.

Michael, please realize that the only reason people comment on the
patch series is because they care about what the series brings to
us.  In other words, your effort is appreciated.  For a change that
we want to have in our codebase, the functionality of the code
immediately after the change is applied of course is important, but
the maintainability of the result also matters.

We want to make sure that anybody who wants to understand and
improve the system can read the code without distraction from
inconsistent coding styles used in different sections of code.  We
want "git log" (or "git log git-svn.perl perl/") output to tell a
coherent story about how the code evolved and why these changes are
made in a consistent voice to the readers.  We want people to be
able to "git log | grep Signed-off-by:" to count the contributors.

A contributor has enough room to be creative in how his or her code
is designed.  Updating the code to follow the "convert as early as
possible", and (during subsequent discussion with Eric) suggesting
use of class instances instead of bare strings to make it harder to
mistakenly use bare unconverted strings are two examples you already
showed creativity in areas that matter.

There is no need to be creative in ChangeLog and coding styles; it
only hurts maintainability.

Regarding the operator overloading of "eq" for comparing the
converted strings, I still think it will hurt maintainablity (we
want to make sure that it is harder, not easier, to make wrong
changes to the code in the future), but I may be mistaken and you
may have better ideas.  If you can use overloading in such a way
that it won't harm maintainability and yet makes the resulting code
easier to read, I don't have any objection.

What I won't accept is "maintainability does not matter".  It does.

Thanks.

  reply	other threads:[~2012-07-31 23:05 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 50+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-07-28  9:47 Fix git-svn for SVN 1.7 Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 1/8] SVN 1.7 will truncate "not-a%40{0}" to just "not-a" Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28 14:16   ` Jonathan Nieder
2012-07-28 19:32     ` Michael G Schwern
2012-10-09  8:41       ` [PATCH/RFC] svn test: escape peg revision separator using empty peg rev Jonathan Nieder
2012-10-09  9:47         ` Michael J Gruber
2012-10-09 10:19           ` Jonathan Nieder
2012-10-10 20:37             ` Eric Wong
2012-10-10 21:02               ` Jonathan Nieder
2012-10-10 21:31                 ` Eric Wong
2012-10-10 21:42                   ` Jonathan Nieder
2012-10-10 22:16                     ` Eric Wong
2012-10-10 22:33               ` Junio C Hamano
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 2/8] Fix typo in test Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 3/8] Improve our URL canonicalization to be more like SVN 1.7's Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 4/8] Replace hand rolled URL escapes with canonicalization Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 5/8] Canonicalize earlier in a couple spots Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 6/8] Add function to append a path to a URL Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 7/8] Turn on canonicalization on newly minted URLs Michael G. Schwern
2012-10-06 19:24   ` [PATCH/RFC] test: work around SVN 1.7 mishandling of svn:special changes Jonathan Nieder
2012-10-09 10:12     ` [PATCH/RFC v2] git svn: " Jonathan Nieder
2012-10-10 20:11       ` Eric Wong
2012-10-10 20:47         ` [PATCH v3] " Jonathan Nieder
2012-07-28  9:47 ` [PATCH 8/8] Remove some ad hoc canonicalizations Michael G. Schwern
2012-07-30 20:38 ` Fix git-svn for SVN 1.7 Eric Wong
2012-07-30 21:10   ` Michael G Schwern
2012-07-30 22:15     ` Eric Wong
2012-07-31  1:04       ` Michael G Schwern
2012-07-31  2:18         ` Eric Wong
2012-07-31  4:30           ` Michael G Schwern
2012-07-31  6:53   ` Junio C Hamano
2012-07-31  9:54     ` Michael G Schwern
2012-07-31 20:01       ` Eric Wong
2012-07-31 23:05         ` Junio C Hamano [this message]
2012-07-31 23:28           ` Michael G Schwern
2012-07-31 23:24         ` Michael G Schwern
2012-08-01 21:30           ` Eric Wong
2012-08-02 10:31 ` Eric Wong
2012-08-02 16:07   ` Jonathan Nieder
2012-08-02 18:58     ` Junio C Hamano
2012-08-02 19:50       ` Robin H. Johnson
2012-08-02 22:10         ` Eric Wong
2012-08-21  4:04       ` Junio C Hamano
2012-08-21 21:03         ` Eric Wong
2012-08-21 21:34           ` Junio C Hamano
2012-08-02 20:51     ` Eric Wong
2012-08-02 21:22       ` Junio C Hamano
2012-08-02 21:42         ` Eric Wong
2012-08-02 21:55           ` Eric Wong
2012-08-02 22:05             ` Junio C Hamano

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