Re: [PATCH v3 5/5] add -p: ignore dirty submodules

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Junio,

On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>
> > And it is that doubling of work that I tried to avoid when implementing
> > the built-in version. The bug came about because the full diff call wasn't
> > using the `--ignore-submodules=dirty` option, and that's what I missed.
> >
> > This is maybe more interesting a story for the cover letter, to be able to
> > understand how this bug was introduced, and maybe to offer an opportunity
> > for others (in addition to myself) to learn from my mistake.
>
> Yup, the moral of the story is premature optimization bites because
> we are not always careful ;-)

Yes. Maybe even more generally: trying to do too many things at once is
prone to introduce bugs.

> Anyhow, I am getting an impression that the behaviour of the next
> iteration would be much closer to the original, which is excellent.

Yep!

> We have seen too many "ah, this is broken and here is a fix that is
> appropriate in the context of how the new C version does it", not
> "ok, let's make the whole thing behave more like what we used to
> have".

Unfortunately so.

It is a fine line, and not always possible to tread safely, between trying
to stay close to the original and trying to learn the lesson from Elijah
that converting scripts to C without playing to C's strengths causes a lot
of hiccups later on. There are probably better alternatives for
prototyping Git functionality than using either an untyped language that
cannot hold complex data structures in memory or a language to which
everything looks like a map ;-)

Ciao,
Dscho