Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 13/16] reftable: remove outdated file reftable.c

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2021 17:53:30 +0100

On Wed, Dec 22 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> "Han-Wen Nienhuys via GitGitGadget" <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> From: Han-Wen Nienhuys <[email-masked]>
>>
>> This was renamed to generic.c, but the origin was never removed
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Han-Wen Nienhuys <[email-masked]>
>> ---
>>  reftable/reftable.c | 115 --------------------------------------------
>>  1 file changed, 115 deletions(-)
>>  delete mode 100644 reftable/reftable.c
>
> That's embarrassing for all reviewers of past reftable patches.

As one of those reviewers: I think it suggests something different:

Various people looked it over, but this amount of code is just too much
for someone to review in one sitting, so it's not unexpected that
various things like this slipped through.

The current landing of this topic on "master" is based on a plan I
suggested, i.e. to have the library and its own tests in "master" first,
and not to do any of the integration yet.

Exactly because we expected that we would not be getting any of this
right the first time around.

So if anything I think these current topics and recent reftable activity
suggest that we should have been more willing to get it into "master"
earlier, and not wait until all bugs in it were solved beforehand.

I.e. there's bugs in the code, but they're well-contained, since nothing
in-tree uses it except its own tests.

And by having merged it down we're benefiting from more eyes, both in
terms of human review, and in the review of various tooling (like
coverity) that's being run on "master" but not on some random branch
that's languishing in "seen" for months.