On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 09:31:18AM -0500, Jeff King wrote: > On Sat, Dec 09, 2017 at 09:40:07PM +0100, Christian Couder wrote: > > > The changes compared to v2 are: > > > > - s/_val/_arg/ in the name of the functions > > - s/val/arg/ in the name of the third argument of the functions > > - works with NULL as third argument of the functions > > This whole series looks OK to me, but this third point made me wonder: > what would be the use of allowing NULL for the "arg" parameter? > > I didn't see any use of this in the series, and I'm having trouble > figuring out how it would be useful. E.g., if I do: > > if (skip_to_optional_arg(arg, "--foo", NULL)) > ... > > what can I do in "..."? I know we matched _some_ type of "--foo", but I > cannot know whether it was "--foo" or "--foo=bar", nor what "bar" is. It > could only be used by some kind of vague validator to say "well, at > least this looks like an option that I _could_ parse if I wanted to". > > So I guess I don't mind it, as it does the most reasonable thing it can > when passed NULL, but I would be surprised if we ever actually exercise > the code path. And of course as soon as I sent this, I went back and double-checked. And indeed I totally missed this call: + else if (starts_with(arg, "-B") || + skip_to_optional_arg(arg, "--break-rewrites", NULL)) { if ((options->break_opt = diff_scoreopt_parse(arg)) == -1) So that's kind-of weird, because we are parsing "-B", etc, and then expecting it to be _reparsed_ by diff_scoreopt_parse. So the two callsites must always match. IMHO this ought to do either: - we should just ask diff_scoreopt_parser to tell us if this was a valid option that it understood or - parse up to the "=", and then ask the scoreopt parser to parse the remainder. This would require us passing 'B'/'C'/'M' to the function ourselves, I think that's a better pattern. It means we could reuse the parser for things like config values if we wanted to (our current diff.renames is a bool, but it would not be unreasonable for it to take a score). None of that is a mess of your creation, though, so I'm OK punting on it for now. -Peff