On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 12:13:41PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

John Keeping wrote:

quoted

Calling across from one builtin/*.c file to another is just as wrong as
calling into a builtin/*.c file from a top-level file but the build
system happens not to enforce the former.

So libgit.a is a collection of everything that is shared between
builtins?  Does that correspond to reality?

I think that's *precisely* what libgit.a is.  It doesn't currently
correspond exactly to reality, but that's mostly for historic reasons
(see below).

quoted

  $ ls *.h | sed 's/.h$/.c/' | xargs file

An example violation: builtin/log.c uses functions defined in
builtin/shortlog.c.

What is the point of all this separation, if no external scripts are
ever going to use libgit.a?

Why do we structure code in a certain way at all?  The reason libgit.a
was introduced (according to commit 0a02ce7) is:

    This introduces the concept of git "library" objects that
    the real programs use, and makes it easier to add such
    things to a "libgit.a".

And all the functions should be static, which doesn't seem to be the case:

00000000000003c0 T add_files_to_cache
0000000000000530 T interactive_add
0000000000000410 T run_add_interactive
0000000000001920 T textconv_object
00000000000005b0 T fmt_merge_msg
0000000000000090 T fmt_merge_msg_config
0000000000000c00 T init_db
0000000000000b40 T set_git_dir_init
0000000000000360 T overlay_tree_on_cache
0000000000000500 T report_path_error
00000000000011a0 T copy_note_for_rewrite
0000000000001210 T finish_copy_notes_for_rewrite
0000000000001060 T init_copy_notes_for_rewrite
0000000000000000 T prune_packed_objects
0000000000000510 T shortlog_add_commit
00000000000006b0 T shortlog_init
0000000000000780 T shortlog_output
0000000000000000 T stripspace

A quick check with "git log -S..." shows that most of these have barely
been touched since the builtin/ directory was created.  So the reason
they're not static is most likely because no one has tidied them up
since the division between builtins was introduced.

It is a fact of life that as we live and work with a system we realise
that there may be a better way of doing something.  This doesn't mean
that someone needs to immediately convert everything to the new way,
it is often sufficient to do new things in the new way and slowly move
existing things across as and when they are touched for other reasons.