Re: [PATCH] implemented strbuf_write_or_die()

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:
>> On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 1:31 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>> Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:
>>>> It's not obvious from the patch fragment, but 'heads' is not a strbuf,
>>>> so Faiz correctly left this invocation alone.
>>>
>>> That is a very good sign why this change is merely a code-churn and
>>> not an improvement, isn't it?  We know (and any strbuf user should
>>> know) that ->buf and ->len are the ways to learn the pointer and the
>>> length the strbuf holds.  Why anybody thinks it is benefitial to
>>> introduce another function that is _only_ for writing out strbuf and
>>> cannot be used to write out a plain buffer is simply beyond me.
>>
>> As a potential GSoC student and newcomer to the project, Faiz would
>> not have known that this would be considered unwanted churn when he
>> chose the task from the GSoC microproject page [1]. Perhaps it would
>> be a good idea to retire this item from the list?
>
> I don't think I saw this on the microproject suggestion page when I
> last looked at it, and assumed that this was on the student's own
> initiative.

I also had not seen it earlier on the microprojects page and had the
same reaction until I re-checked the page and found that it had been
added [1].

The microprojects page already instructs students to indicate that a
submission is for GSoC [2] (and many have followed the advice), but
perhaps we can avoid this sort of misunderstanding in the future by
making it more explicit: for instance, tell them to add [GSoC] to the
Subject:.

[1]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/commit/f314120a2b5e831459673c612a3630ad953d9954
[2]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/blame/master/SoC-2014-Microprojects.md#L83

>> On the other hand, it did expose Faiz to the iterative code review
>> process on this project and gave him a taste of what would be expected
>> of him as a GSoC student, so the microproject achieved that important
>> goal, and thus wasn't an utter failure.
>>
>> [1]: https://github.com/git/git.github.io/blob/master/SoC-2014-Microprojects.md
>
> Surely.
>
> I would have to say that this is not a good sample exercise to
> suggest to new students and I'd encourage dropping it from the list.
> You could argue that it is an effective way to cull people with bad
> design taste to mix suggestions to make the codebase worse and see
> who picks them, but I do not think it is very fair ;-)

Agreed. The item should be dropped from the list.