Tic Tac, Tic, Tac… I am already getting emails from GSoC warning me that there is little time left.
Picking up where I left it last week, a few hours later I sent the v3 and out of this version came some nits and a small ordering problem.
The past series, the client already had %(objecttype) in its list and I did this
for a simple reason, there are 4 possible cases:
- the client knows it but the server does not (new client vs old server)
- the client does not know it but the server does (old client vs new server)
- both know it (everyone is new)
- neither knows it (unsupported capability)
From what we have been building, invented placeholders like %(IJustInventedThis)
simply die(), for the placeholders that exist locally there is another behavior:
If it is not supported by the client or the server, the output of these when
expanding them will be an empty string.
For example:
we ask for “%(objectname) %(objectsize) %(objecttype)” but our server does not support type.
therefore our result will be:
“<OID> <size> "
The list was designed so that even if new placeholders were added it would be idempotent, because nothing would happen until a server did advertise that attribute, that’s why having type in there changed no behavior at all.
It was there because it was interesting for the tests, a client did not know how to parse if a server offered type and it did not know how to ask for it either, but it did know how to understand if a user wanted it. This way we had tested:
- unknown + unsupported, as
%(deltabase)is - known + unsupported, as
%(objecttype)was (that’s why it was on the list) - known + supported, as
%(objectsize)is
However with the back and forth of the type series that I am taking advantage of
to leave things clean, this stopped making sense. Using object_info and the list
worked because object_info already had a type field, so listing type cost
nothing. Now that we dedicate an array per attribute it would mean carrying a
types array that nobody fills, so I preferred to drop it there and implement type
fully later in the series.
Patches 1-5 are preparatory. They don’t change what the command does:
- [1/9] is a test cleanup.
- [2/9] fixes a possible bug in case of a malformed response.
- [3/9] and [4/9] refactor how the object data is stored and handled. The why about this refactor comes from [1].
- [5/9] drops the last error return left in fetch_object_info().
Patches 6-9 are the actual objecttype support:
- [6/9] teaches the server to answer type.
- [7/9] teaches the client to parse it.
- [8/9] advertises the capability so the client can start asking it.
- [9/9] unifies the default format.
and for the v5 there will be one more preparatory patch that Jeff King made, for a total of 10 where 6 are prep.
The shape has changed quite a bit, there is no longer an allow-list that we filter but something simpler which is having our own struct where we have flags if the client wants X attribute of an object and these are saved in a new struct:
struct fetch_object_info_results {
size_t *sizes;
enum object_type *types;
uint8_t *unrecognized;
size_t nr;
unsigned wants_size:1;
unsigned wants_type:1;
};
instead of having an array of struct object_info we save all our data here so we
do not have an array of object_info that was not made for that.
The truth is that it has been quiet and there is not much more, I will put in Jeff King’s patch, but there is nothing for now that I have to change.
I think this has been the briefest week of all (taking into account that the last one I published on Sunday) but it has been very quiet.
Saturday edit on friday night I sent the v5 and the static test failed, while all the others were fine, look, I usually wait for the tests to pass but I was already seeing everything green and I assumed the rest would go the same way.
However, it was not like that, strangely everything was fine except the static, which was a bit odd to me because I thought that at least on some platform or something it should fail too, but no, everything green except the static.
The solution was easy, two forward declarations and fixed.
Outside of GSoC these weeks I have been tying up loose ends to go live in Lisbon this year and everything is going smoothly, for now I already have all the paperwork done, so by the first days of September I will be there already since university starts.
I also did a couple of streams programming, I like it quite a lot and I talk, but to concentrate well I need to be in silence which is a bit counterproductive for streaming. But well, I have to improve.
I have bought a new book which is a well known one:
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
It will arrive next week.
See you next week,
Pablo