Re: several messages

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Sep 02, 2022 at 02:16:21PM -0400, Eric Sunshine wrote:

> > It would be one thing if we could use a well-maintained third-party tool
> > to do this job. But adding this to our plate? I hope we can avoid that.
> 
> I understand your concerns about review and maintenance burden, and
> you're not the first to make such observations; when chainlint.sed was
> submitted, it was greeted with similar concerns[1,2], all very
> understandable. The key takeaway[3] from that conversation, though,
> was that, unlike user-facing features which must be reviewed in detail
> and maintained in perpetuity, this is a mere developer aid which can
> be easily ejected from the project if it ever becomes a maintenance
> burden or shows itself to be unreliable. Potential maintenance burden
> aside, a very real benefit of such a tool is that it should help
> prevent bugs from slipping into the project going forward[4], which is
> indeed the aim of all our developer-focused aids.

Thanks for this response and especially the links. My initial gut
response was similar to Dscho's. Which is not surprising, because it
apparently was also my initial response to chainlint.sed back then. ;)

But I do think that chainlint.sed has proven itself to be both useful
and not much of a maintenance burden. My only real complaint was the
additional runtime in a few corner cases, and that is exactly what
you're addressing here.

I'm not excited about carefully reviewing it. At the same time, given
the low stakes, I'm kind of willing to accept that between the tests and
the results of running it on the current code base, the proof is in the
pudding.

-Peff