Re: [PATCH] Revert "graph.c: mark private file-scope symbols as static"

[John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>]

On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 08:16:13PM +0100, Thomas Rast wrote:
> John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:
> 
> > This reverts commit ba35480439d05b8f6cca50527072194fe3278bbb.
> >
> > CGit uses these symbols to output the correct HTML around graph
> > elements.  Making these symbols private means that CGit cannot be
> > updated to use Git 1.8.0 or newer, so let's not do that.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>
> > ---
> >
> > I realise that Git isn't a library so making the API useful for outside
> > projects isn't a priority, but making these two methods public makes
> > life a lot easier for CGit.
> >
> > Additionally, it seems that Johan added graph_set_column_colors
> > specifically so that CGit should use it - there's no value to having
> > that as a method just for its use in graph.c and he was the author of
> > CGit commit 268b34a (ui-log: Colorize commit graph, 2010-11-15).
> 
> Perhaps you could add a comment in the source to prevent this from
> happening again?

That feels wrong to me; would we really want a list of "$OUTSIDE_PROJECT
uses this" against all methods?  CGit is using Git's internal API and so
should be prepared for breakage and to do what is necessary to work
around it - it's just this one case where adding a 2 line function to
Git makes CGit's life a lot easier.

I would hope that having this message in the history should be enough to
prevent this changing in the future; and it means that the comment is
associated with a date so that someone can decide to check whether CGit
is still using this function in the distant future.


John