On Mon, Dec 16, 2019 at 05:43:21PM -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Jeff King wrote: > > > I actually wonder if the whole thing would be simpler if command-list.h > > was a static tracked file with the declarations, and we generated > > command-list.c with "extern const char *command_list[]", etc. > > Right, or a "command-list.inc" file. > > extern-ing it seems like the simplest way to go. If only. I took a brief look at this. Besides the Makefile chaos (did you know that the vcxproj rule manually builds and git-adds command-list.h? No idea what is going on there), it looks like we dynamically generate the category bitfield, which is then used directly in help.c. We _could_ declare those bitfields as externs themselves, but part of the point is that the full list of categories is generated dynamically from command-list.txt. So we'd either split the list into two (one list of categories special enough to be manually declared, and the rest that get generated automatically) or we'd end up just duplicating the whole list. Certainly this could all be untangled, but given that the system is working just fine as it is, it doesn't seem worth anybody's time (and the risk of weird follow-on problems) to adjust it. -Peff
