Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 00/27] Prepare the sequencer for the upcoming rebase -i patches

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2016 13:00:31 -0700

Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> writes:

>> I still do not understand (note that I am not saying "I do not
>> accept"--acceptance or rejection happens after an understandable
>> explanation is given, and "do not understand" means no such
>> explanation has been given yet) your justification behind adding a
>> technical debt to reimplement the author-script parser and not
>> sharing it with "git am" in 13/27.
>
> At this point, I am most of all reluctant to introduce such a huge change,
> which surely would introduce a regression.

That is a perfectly sensible and honest answer that I can
understand, accept and even support.

You've been working on the series for several months, running with
these dozen or so lines of code, and replacing it with another dozen
or so lines of code would require you to make sure the result is
actually doing the same thing for the remainder of your series.  And
I agree that is an unnecessary risk in order to ship a working code.
The code being battle tested counts.

I cared on this point mostly because I wanted to make sure that
people later can find out why there are two functions that ought to
be doing the same thing.  

If there were a technical reason why these two must stay to be
different implementations that are potentially doing different
things, I want to see that reason described, so that those who come
later and want to refactor the helper functions into one later will
know why they are separate in the first place.

If on the other hand there isn't any technical reason why they must
stay to be different, and they are different mostly because you
happened to have written a different one in 13/27 and have been
running with it, that is also a good thing for them to know.