Re: [PATCH RFC v3 2/2] Move libgit.a sources into separate "lib/" directory

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

>> > My own (obviously subjective and biased) take is that the tradeoff is
>> > worth it, as these issues are a one-time cost while the benefits to
>> > discoverability will be permanent.
>> 
>> It is not a one-time cost, but will be an ongoing burden.
>
> It is maybe drawn-out, but it is a one-time cost. It's not like we're
> going to mass-rename source files to move them to `lib/` every two weeks
> from now on.

Since the topic was posted, I have dealt with the fallout from it at
least twice a day (which, when we are lucky, is not a huge time
sink, as I have mostly automated it by now), and again every time a
new topic is posted that touches the moved files in substantial ways
or adds new files that ought to be moved.  The latter is the most
time-consuming to handle.  This will continue until all contemporary
topics, as well as the topic in question, graduate.

If that is not an ongoing burden, I do not know what is.

> And this statement neglects to acknowledge that the lack of clean
> organization of source code files is an ongoing burden _right now_, and
> would be at least partially addressed by the move.

At least, Gábor does not seem to think that the lack of clean
organization is so severe as to warrant a massive code churn like
this.

I value stability much more than prettiness.  If we had started out
with almost nothing at the root level and almost everything in
either 'lib' or 'builtin', I would have strongly preferred to keep
that structure.  But since we have been using a layout that has all
built-in commands in 'builtin', with subsystems like 'refs' and
'odb' in their own directories, and everything else at the root
level, I would prefer to keep that organization until a substantial
subsystem update wants to carve out a new location for itself, just
as past updates to create 'builtin', 'refs', and 'odb' did.

Compared to those past moves, the proposed change looks more like
churn for the sake of moving things around, without achieving any
real organizational improvement.

I must say that I, too, remain skeptical.