Re: [PATCH 08/21] maintenance: initialize task array and hashmap

Derrick Stolee [off-list ref] writes:

On 7/8/2020 10:25 PM, Jonathan Tan wrote:

quoted

quoted

This list is also inserted into a hashmap. This allows command-line
arguments to quickly find the tasks by name, not sensitive to case. To
ensure this list and hashmap work well together, the list only contains
pointers to the struct information. This will allow a sort on the list
while preserving the hashmap data.

I think having the hashmap is unnecessarily complicated in this case -
with the small number of tasks, a list would be fine. But I don't feel
strongly about this.

You're probably right that iterating through a list with (hopefully)
at most a dozen entries is fast enough that a hashmap is overkill here.

Now is the real test: can I change this patch in v2 without needing
to mess with any of the others? The intention here was to make adding
tasks as simple as possible, so we shall see. :D

Adding a new element to a list would be simple no matter how the
list is represented.  But I think the real question is what access
pattern we expect.  Do we need to look up by name a single one or
selected few?  Do we need the iteration/enumeration be stable?  etc.