Re: [PATCH v4 15/15] daemon: opt-out on features that require posix

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

A response to the general questions.

Erik Faye-Lund wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

>> Why does the signature even have to be different between the two to begin
>> with? I _think_ you have gid_t over there
>
> We don't, so this is the primary reason.

Just to throw an idea out: you can also do something like

#ifndef NO_POSIX_GOODIES
struct credentials {
};
#else
struct credentials {
	struct passwd *pass;
	gid_t gid;
}
#endif

and pass a pointer to credentials around.

> But also avoiding
> compilation-warnings is a secondary motivation.

(void) gid;

works for this.

> We do, so this becomes a bit of a hypothetical question. But would you
> seriously consider pretending to have a posix-feature less ugly than
> inlining a function that is only used once?

In general, yes.

Long functions can make code much, much more difficult to read.  A
fake posix feature just requires some suspension of disbelief.

In this case (#ifdef-heavy main() vs opaque struct passwd), both
strike me as ugly.

> (I'm going a little off-topic here, I hope that's OK)
> I'm not too happy with some of the
> pretend-really-hard-to-be-posix-magic around in the Windows-port. In
> fact, I have some patches to reduce posixness in some areas, while
> getting rid of some code in mingw.c. Would such patches be welcome, or
> is pretend-to-be-posix the governing portability approach? In some
> cases, this comes at the expense of some performance (and quite a bit
> of added cludge), which is a bit contradictory to the Git design IMO.

Sometimes the best abstraction is the posix one and sometimes not.  I
don't think this would contradict with your planned patches, unless
they introduce #ifdefs all over the place.

>> This is especially
>> true if you are making the "drop-privileges" part a helper function, no?
>
> I don't follow this part. What exactly becomes more true by having a
> drop-privileges function?

(See linux-2.6.git:Documentation/SubmittingPatches, section "#ifdefs
are ugly".)

The ideal: never an #ifdef within a function.  (Well, the ideal is
no #ifdef-s in .c files, but that's harder to take seriously.)

#ifndef HAVE_POSIX_GOODIES
static int drop_privileges(...)
{
	return error("--user and --group not supported on this platform");
}
#endif
static int drop_privileges(...)
{
	...
	do
	something
	...
}
#endif

would make serve() look like

static int serve(...)
{
	int socknum, *socklist;

	... setup socket ...

	if (want to drop privileges) {
		if (drop_privileges(...))
			return -1;
	}

	return service_loop(socknum, socklist);
}

which should be quite readable even to a person only interested in the
!HAVE_POSIX_GOODIES case imho.  With some code rearrangement it could
be made nicer.  Now compare:

static int serve(...)
{
	int socknum, *socklist;

	... setup socket ...

#ifdef HAVE_POSIX_GOODIES
	...
	do
	things
	...
#endif

	return service_loop(socknum, socklist);
}

Just my two cents.  Sorry I do not have something more substantive to
say.