Re: [PATCH v2 1/6] compat: add function to enable nonblocking pipes

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2022 at 01:23:25PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> The only small "huh?" factor was that the name of the helper is not
> enable_nonblock(), but singles out pipe as valid thing to work on.
> I think it is perfectly fine, given that the current plan we have is
> to use this on the pipe with the command we spawn with
> pipe_command(), and it probably is even preferrable to explicitly
> declare that this is designed to only work with pipes and future
> developers who try to abuse it on other kinds of file descriptors
> are on their own.  And "pipe" in the name of this helper may be such
> a declaration that is strong enough.

My goal was to explain that "huh" with this bit in the commit message:

> > The interface is as narrow as possible to let platforms do what's
> > natural there (rather than having to implement fcntl() and a fake
> > O_NONBLOCK for example, or having to handle other types of descriptors).

without going into too many details. I do think it would be easier to
explain if the Windows implementation was added in the same commit
(since it is explicitly just about pipes), but I wanted to credit René
as the author there. I'm not sure if it's worth folding them together
and adding a co-author credit instead. Or maybe I should state outright
in this commit message that we're doing it for Windows. ;)

-Peff