Hi, On Mon, 3 Sep 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 08:32:16AM +0000, Matthieu Moy wrote: > >> ... > >> For example, it would be very tempting to compare files with > >> "strcmp(buf1, buf2)", but that would just fail silently when the file > >> contains a '\0' byte. > > > > Indeed, OTHO doing that would be pretty silly, as embending NULs in a > > strbuf is wrong, it's a _str_buf, not a random-binary-buffer. It's meant > > to make the use of strings easier, not to use as generic purpose byte > > buffers. Of course they can, but well, it's not what they are designed > > for in the first place. > > People, please realize strbuf "API" is not a serious API. > > It wasn't even intended to be anything more than just a > quick-and-dirty implementation of fgets that can grow > dynamically. The other callers added by people to have it do > general string manipulations were just bolted-on, not designed. > I haven't taken a serious look at bstring nor any of the > alternatives yet, but defending strbuf as if it was designed to > be a sane API is just silly. Two points: - it can be turned into an API (pretty easy, really, since it is _really_ small), and - it is easy to hack on, because it is _not_ a full-blown cover-them-all library. As such, we can tweak it the way _we_ want. And if that means that we do not NUL terminate, so be it. And if that means that we turn it into a rope structure, so be it. IOW it might be utterly incomplete, but at least it can evolve in a manner that we like. It does not need to be a *kaboom-here-we-have-a-big-dump*. I know that we had something like that with LibXDiff. I was not particularly happy with the process, but it turned out quite well, as Davide helped us a lot. But the diff situation is completely different from the string situation: - we did not have _anything_ in the way of diff generation, - it is pretty well defined what a diff generation library should do, and - diff generation is not trivial, and it would have taken us quite a long time to write it ourselves. All three points are not true with string manipulation. But code talks, and as I do not have anything presentable (yet), I'll just shut up, until I have. Ciao, Dscho - 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
