Re: [PATCH] refs.h: make all flags arguments unsigned

[Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 3:02 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> "Han-Wen Nienhuys via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > From: Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>
> >
> > As discussed in
> > https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqbkzrkevo.fsf@gitster.g/ , we don't
> > want to treat the sign bit specially, so make all flags in refs.h
> > unsigned.
>
> It may be true that we do not want to, but are we sure there is no
> code that already uses some cleverness to make the topmost bit
> special by e.g. doing ugly things like "if (flags < 0)" ;-)?

In refs.h, we don't have any bitmasks that accept 32 different bit
values, so it's hard to see how we would stumble into a case like
that.

> I haven't had energy to vet the entire codebase for all flag words
> and that is why I've never produced a patch like this one myself.
>
> Thanks for carefully vetting after creating this (presumably
> mechanically prepared) patch---producing is the easy part, but
> making sure it does not break unexpectedly is much harder.

I went over the changes once more, uniformizing the naming. I didn't
see any shenanigans.

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Han-Wen Nienhuys - Google Munich
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