Subject: Re: Git in Outreachy December 2019?

From: SZEDER Gábor <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2019 11:47:23 +0200

On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 08:07:09PM +0200, SZEDER Gábor wrote:
> Here is one more idea for microprojects:
> 
>   Find a group of related preprocessor constants and turn them into an
>   enum.  Also find where those constants are stored in variables and
>   in structs and passed around as function parameters, and change the
>   type of those variables, fields and parameters to the new enum.

Peff thought elsewhere in the thread that this is a good idea, so I
wanted to try out how this microproject would work in practice, and to 
add a commit that we can show as a good example, and therefore set out 
to convert 'cache_entry->ce_flags' to an enum...  and will soon send
out a RFH patch, because I hit a snag, and am not sure what to do
about it :)  Anyway:

  - Finding a group of related preprocessor constants is trivial: the
    common prefixes and vertically aligned values of related constants
    stand out in output of 'git grep #define'.  Converting them to an
    enum is fairly trivial as well.

  - Converting various integer types of variables, struct fields, and
    function parameters to the new enum is... well, I wouldn't say
    that it's hard, but it's tedious (but 'ce_flags' with about 20
    related constants is perhaps the biggest we have).  OTOH, it's all 
    fairly mechanical, and doesn't require any understanding of Git
    internals.  Overall I think that this is indeed a micro-sized
    microproject, but...

  - The bad news is that I expect that reviewing the variable, etc.
    type conversions will be just as tedious, and it's quite easy to
    miss a conversion or three, so I'm afraid that several rerolls
    will be necessary.