Re: cleanups with long-term benefits (was Re: [PATCH] schemas: Add vim modeline)

[Markus Armbruster]

John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> writes:

> On 8/4/20 4:03 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>> The pain of tweaking the parser is likely dwarved several times over by
>> the pain of the flag day.
>
> You mention this often; I wonder if I misunderstand the critique,
> because the pain of a "flag day" for a new file format seems
> negligible to me.
>
> I don't think we edit these .json files very often. Generally, we add
> a new command when we need one. The edits are usually one or two lines
> plus docstrings.
>
> If anyone has patches in-flight, I genuinely doubt it will take more
> than a few minutes to rewrite for the new file format.
>
> No?

You describe the the flag day's one-time pain.

There's also the longer term pain of having to work around git-blame
unable to see beyond the flag day.

I'm not claiming the pain is prohibitive (if I thought it was, I
would've tried to strange this thread in its crib), I am claiming it'll
be much more painful (read: expensive) than a parser tweak.