On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 09:22:32PM -0700, Elijah Newren wrote: > > Not your fault & this pre-dates your patch, but FWIW I prefer our APIs > > that don't have these "hidden struct" shenanigans (like say "struct > > string_list") so a caller could just access this, we can just declare it > > "const" appropriately. > > > > We're also all in-tree friends here, so having various accessors for no > > reason other than to access struct members seems a bit too much. > > That's a fair point, but just to play counterpoint for a minute... > > FWIW, I dislike when our public facing APIs are polluted with all > kinds of internal details. merge-recursive being a case in point. > When writing merge-ort, although I had a struct with public fields, > that struct also contained an opaque struct (pointer) within it to > hide several private fields. (I would have liked to hide or remove a > few more fields, but couldn't do so while the merge_recursive_options > struct was shared between both merge-ort and merge-recursive.) > > That said, I agree it can certainly be overdone, and tmp_objdir is > pretty simple. However, sometimes even in simple cases I like when > folks make use of an opaque struct because it means folks put some > effort into thinking more about the API that should be exposed. > That's something we as a project have often overlooked in the past, as > evidenced both by our one-shot usage mentality, and the existence of > external projects like libgit2 attempting to correct this design > shortcoming. I'd like git to move more towards being structured as a > reusable library as well as a useful command-line tool. Right, it was definitely a conscious decision to keep the tmp-objdir API as slim as possible, just because it's such a complicated and confusing thing in the first place. For something like a strbuf, giving direct access to the fields makes sense. Exposing the details of how the struct works (like accessing ".buf" as a NUL-terminated string) are part of its usefulness. But tmp_objdir represents a more abstract concept, and I wanted to insulate callers from the details. That said, the notion of "this is the path of the objdir" is not that contentious, so I don't mind it too much (but it would be a jump to exposing the details at all). -Peff
