Re: [PATCH v2 4/7] merge-ort: clearer propagation of failure-to-function from merge_submodule

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 7:12 PM Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/18/24 11:00 PM, Elijah Newren via GitGitGadget wrote:
> > From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
> >
> > The 'clean' member variable is somewhat of a tri-state (1 = clean, 0 =
> > conflicted, -1 = failure-to-determine), but we often like to think of
> > it as binary (ignoring the possibility of a negative value) and use
> > constructs like '!clean' to reflect this.  However, these constructs
> > can make codepaths more difficult to understand, unless we handle the
> > negative case early and return pre-emptively; do that in
> > handle_content_merge() to make the code a bit easier to read.
>
> This patch is correct and valuable.
>
> Would it be valuable to go a bit further and turn 'clean' into
> an enum that reflects these states? Perhaps that would prevent
> future changes from slipping into this mistake.

That may make sense to investigate, but I suspect it may be a bigger
change and would recommend making such a clean up a separate series.

Also, I'm curious if it makes sense to finish off replacing recursive
with ort first; as long as recursive exists, it has the same problem
and in fact was the source of using a tri-state 'clean' variable and
thus would need the same cleanup.  But if we replace recursive with
ort (making explicit requests for 'recursive' be handled by 'ort', as
originally designed and intended), that cuts the number of sites
needing this cleanup in half.