Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] maintenance: use systemd timers on Linux

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 May 2021 15:25:07 +0900

Eric Sunshine <[email-masked]> writes:

>> I think others have strong opinion on not using "%1$s",
>> and prefer simple "%s" and using "exec_path" twice instead.
>
> I brought it up only because I hadn't seen it in Git sources, and
> wasn't sure if we'd want to start using it. Aside from Ævar, who
> seemed reasonably in favor of it, nobody else chimed in, so it could
> go either way, I suppose.

If this were a piece of code that _everybody_ would use on _all_ the
supported platforms, I would suggest declaring that this is a
weather-balloon to see if some platforms have trouble using it.  But
unfortunately this is not such a piece of code.  Dependence on
systemd should strictly be opt-in.

So my preference is

 - here, just do it in the dumb and simple way

 - somewhere else, find code that is compiled and run for everybody
   on all platforms that feeds two same arguments to printf format,
   and update it to use "%1$x" twice, mark it clearly as a weather
   balloon, and document it (see how what 512f41cf did is documented
   in Documentation/CodingGuidelines and mimick, but tone it down as
   we haven't declared it safe to use (yet).

It is likely that we need rearrangement of argument order for po/
files anyway, but a misimplementation might not handle using the
same placeholder twice, and that is why I'd like to be a bit extra
careful.