Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] bisect: add the terms old/new

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2015 09:08:17 -0700

Christian Couder <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]> writes:
>>>
>>> Moving from "one hardcoded pair of terms" to "two hardcoded pairs of
>>> terms" is a nice feature, but hardly a step in the right direction wrt
>>> maintainability.
>>
>> Nicely put.  From that point of view, the variable names and the
>> underlying machinery in general should call these two "new" vs
>> "old".  I.e. name_new=bad name_old=good would be the default, not
>> name_bad=bad name_good=good.
>
> I don't think this would improve maintainability, at least not for me.
> The doc currently uses "good/bad" everywhere.

You are conflating the internal implementation and the end-user
facing interface, I think.

The topic under discussion is about updating the internal
implementation more generic and make it capable of handling both the
traditional and the default 'find transition from good to bad' and
any other kinds that can be expressed by 'find transition from $old
to $new' where the values of $old and $new can be specified by the
end user.  And then we keep old=good new=bad as the default.

And the best time to update the implementation to express its
operation in terms of 'find transition from $old to $new' is when
such a feature is introduced, in other words, inside this topic.

If you still are thinking in terms of 'find transition from $good to
$bad', then I can understand that you would disagree with the above,
but I think you are on the same page as Matthieu and me that we are
updating the system to use "'find transition from $old to $new' where
the values of $old and $new can be specified by the end user" as the
new paradigm.

And it is perfectly fine for the documentation to talk about the
feature using the default pair of words.

Hopefully this clarifies.