On 9/27/2022 12:21 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

On Tue, Sep 27 2022, Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

 /**
  * Finds and returns the value list, sorted in order of increasing priority
  * for the configuration variable `key`. When the configuration variable
- * `key` is not found, returns NULL. The caller should not free or modify
- * the returned pointer, as it is owned by the cache.
+ * `key` is not found, returns an empty list. The caller should not free or
+ * modify the returned pointer, as it is owned by the cache.
  */
 const struct string_list *git_config_get_value_multi(const char *key);

Aside from the "DWIM API" aspect of this (which I don't mind) I think
this is really taking the low-level function in the wrong direction, and
that we should just add a new simple wrapper instead.

I.e. both the pre-image API docs & this series gloss over the fact that
we'd not just return NULL here if the config wasn't there, but also if
git_config_parse_key() failed.

So it seems to me that a better direction would be starting with
something like the WIP below (which doesn't compile the whole code, I
stopped at config.[ch] and pack-bitmap.c). I.e. the same "int" return
and "dest" pattern that most other things in the config API have.

Do you have an example where a caller would benefit from this
distinction? Without such an example, I don't think it is worth
creating such a huge change for purity's sake alone.

I'm pretty happy that the diff for this series is an overall
reduction in code, while also not being too large in the interim:

 12 files changed, 39 insertions(+), 57 deletions(-)

If all callers that use the *_multi() methods would only use the
wrapper, then what is the point of doing the low-level manipulations?

Thanks,
-Stolee