On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Eric Sunshine <sunshine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >>>> It's not obvious from the patch fragment, but 'heads' is not a strbuf, >>>> so Faiz correctly left this invocation alone. >>> >>> That is a very good sign why this change is merely a code-churn and >>> not an improvement, isn't it? We know (and any strbuf user should >>> know) that ->buf and ->len are the ways to learn the pointer and the >>> length the strbuf holds. Why anybody thinks it is benefitial to >>> introduce another function that is _only_ for writing out strbuf and >>> cannot be used to write out a plain buffer is simply beyond me. >> >> As a potential GSoC student and newcomer to the project, Faiz would >> not have known that this would be considered unwanted churn when he >> chose the task from the GSoC microproject page [1]. Perhaps it would >> be a good idea to retire this item from the list? > > I don't think I saw this on the microproject suggestion page when I > last looked at it, and assumed that this was on the student's own > initiative. I also had not seen it earlier on the microprojects page and had the same reaction until I re-checked the page and found that it had been added [1]. The microprojects page already instructs students to indicate that a submission is for GSoC [2] (and many have followed the advice), but perhaps we can avoid this sort of misunderstanding in the future by making it more explicit: for instance, tell them to add [GSoC] to the Subject:. [1]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/commit/f314120a2b5e831459673c612a3630ad953d9954 [2]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/blame/master/SoC-2014-Microprojects.md#L83 >> On the other hand, it did expose Faiz to the iterative code review >> process on this project and gave him a taste of what would be expected >> of him as a GSoC student, so the microproject achieved that important >> goal, and thus wasn't an utter failure. >> >> [1]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/blob/master/SoC-2014-Microprojects.md > > Surely. > > I would have to say that this is not a good sample exercise to > suggest to new students and I'd encourage dropping it from the list. > You could argue that it is an effective way to cull people with bad > design taste to mix suggestions to make the codebase worse and see > who picks them, but I do not think it is very fair ;-) Agreed. The item should be dropped from the list. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html