Re: [PATCH] pretty-print: de-tabify indented logs to make things line up properly

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>  (1) if turning your "preparation; do { ... } while()" into
>      "while () { }" would make the result a bit easier to read;

So it's probably partly taste, but I will also disagree with your
"easier to read", because of the way the code is logically structured.

In particular, the "no TAB" case is actually *fundamentally* different
from the "no TAB at the end" case. The return value is different, and
the caller does very different things - the code tries to make it very
clear that that "no TAB" situation is very different from "we found a
TAB".

So it's not "preparation + do-while".

It's "preparation + handle the no-TAB case differently", and then the
"do-while" is very natural because by the time we get to the "ok, we
are now going to need to do something about the line" stage, we
already know we have a tab.

But the code *could* be made to just always do the whole
"strbuf_add()", and not return a return value at all, and the no-tab
case wouldn't be explicitly written to be different.

Let me know if you'd prefer that variant, and I'll send a new version.

>  (2) if we can somehow eliminate duplication of "tab + 1" (spelled
>      differently on the previous line as "1+tab"), the end result
>      may get easier to follow.

Yeah, I considered that. Either by just doing "tab++" before (so the
+1" would come from that in both cases), or by introducing a new
variable like

    ptrdiff_t bytes_used;
    ...
    bytes_used = 1 + tab - line;

and then just doing

    line += bytes_used;
    linelen -= bytes_used;

and the code I wrote just didn't do any of those temporary updates,
and instead just did the "+1" by hand in both cases.

Again, I can redo the patch, just tell me which model you prefer.

                 Linus