Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/6] help: refactor "for_human" control flow in cmd_help()

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2021 10:02:12 -0700

Eric Sunshine <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 11:24 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Instead of having two lines that call list_config_help(for_human)
>> let's setup the pager and print the trailer conditionally. This makes
>> it clearer at a glance how the two differ in behavior.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
>> ---
>> @@ -574,13 +574,12 @@ int cmd_help(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
>> -               if (!for_human) {
>> -                       list_config_help(for_human);
>> -                       return 0;
>> -               }
>> -               setup_pager();
>> +               if (for_human)
>> +                       setup_pager();
>>                 list_config_help(for_human);
>> -               printf("\n%s\n", _("'git help config' for more information"));
>> +               if (for_human)
>> +                       printf("\n%s\n", _("'git help config' for more information"));
>> +
>
> For what it's worth, I find the original logic easier to reason about
> since it gets the "simple" case out of the way early, thus I don't
> have to keep as much (or any) state in mind as I'm reading the rest of
> the code. However, it's highly subjective, of course; just one
> person's opinion.

FWIW, it makes two of us ;-)

Quite honestly, I do not see much commonality in the code above that
targets two different audiences, so whether you handle simple one or
complex one first, a single big switch upfront that gives clearly
separate control flow to two distinct cases is easier to follow than
"as the middle step that calls list_config_help() is the same, let's
have two conditionals before and after and serve these two audiences
with a single code path that is slightly tweaked", which is the
result of this patch.