From c1e4b2b18e9bd7e808285c88ec58eb00ea4942fc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Linus Arver Date: Thu, 2 May 2024 04:54:24 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] trailer: make trailer_info struct private MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In 13211ae23f (trailer: separate public from internal portion of trailer_iterator, 2023-09-09) we moved trailer_info behind an anonymous struct to discourage use by trailer.h API users. However it still left open the possibility of external use of trailer_info itself. Now that there are no external users of trailer_info, we can make this struct private. Make this struct private by putting its definition inside trailer.c. This has two benefits: (1) it makes the surface area of the public facing interface (trailer.h) smaller, and (2) external API users are unable to peer inside this struct (because it is only ever exposed as an opaque pointer). There are a few disadvantages: (A) every time the member of the struct is accessed an extra pointer dereference must be done, and (B) for users of trailer_info outside trailer.c, this struct can no longer be allocated on the stack and may only be allocated on the heap (because its definition is hidden away in trailer.c) and appropriately deallocated by the user, and (C) without good documentation on the API, the opaque struct is hostile to programmers by going opposite to the "Show me your data structures, and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious." mantra [2]. (The disadvantages have already been observed in the two preparatory commits that precede this one.) This commit believes that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages for designing APIs, as explained below. Making trailer_info private exposes existing deficiencies in the API. This is because users of this struct had full access to its internals, so there wasn't much need to actually design it to be "complete" in the sense that API users only needed to use what was provided by the API. For example, the location of the trailer block (start/end offsets relative to the start of the input text) was accessible by looking at these struct members directly. Now that the struct is private, we have to expose new API functions to allow clients to access this information (see builtin/interpret-trailers.c). The idea in this commit to hide implementation details behind an "opaque pointer" is also known as the "pimpl" (pointer to implementation) idiom in C++ and is a common pattern in that language (where, for example, abstract classes only have pointers to concrete classes). However, the original inspiration to use this idiom does not come from C++, but instead the book "C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software" [1]. This book recommends opaque pointers as a good design principle for designing C libraries, using the term "interface" as the functions defined in *.h (header) files and "implementation" as the corresponding *.c file which define the interfaces. The book says this about opaque pointers: ... clients can manipulate such pointers freely, but they can’t dereference them; that is, they can’t look at the innards of the structure pointed to by them. Only the implementation has that privilege. Opaque pointers hide representation details and help catch errors. In our case, "struct trailer_info" is now hidden from clients, and the ways in which this opaque pointer can be used is limited to the richness of . In other words, exclusively controls exactly how "trailer_info" pointers are to be used. [1] Hanson, David R. "C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software". Addison Wesley, 1997. p. 22 [2] Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary". O'Reilly, 1999. Helped-by: Junio C Hamano Helped-by: Christian Couder Signed-off-by: Linus Arver Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano --- trailer.c | 21 +++++++++++++++++++++ trailer.h | 23 ++--------------------- 2 files changed, 23 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-) diff --git a/trailer.c b/trailer.c index 9179dd802c..6167b707ae 100644 --- a/trailer.c +++ b/trailer.c @@ -11,6 +11,27 @@ * Copyright (c) 2013, 2014 Christian Couder */ +struct trailer_info { + /* + * True if there is a blank line before the location pointed to by + * trailer_block_start. + */ + int blank_line_before_trailer; + + /* + * Offsets to the trailer block start and end positions in the input + * string. If no trailer block is found, these are both set to the + * "true" end of the input (find_end_of_log_message()). + */ + size_t trailer_block_start, trailer_block_end; + + /* + * Array of trailers found. + */ + char **trailers; + size_t trailer_nr; +}; + struct conf_info { char *name; char *key; diff --git a/trailer.h b/trailer.h index c8c0018c54..4e0a6789d7 100644 --- a/trailer.h +++ b/trailer.h @@ -4,6 +4,8 @@ #include "list.h" #include "strbuf.h" +struct trailer_info; + enum trailer_where { WHERE_DEFAULT, WHERE_END, @@ -29,27 +31,6 @@ int trailer_set_where(enum trailer_where *item, const char *value); int trailer_set_if_exists(enum trailer_if_exists *item, const char *value); int trailer_set_if_missing(enum trailer_if_missing *item, const char *value); -struct trailer_info { - /* - * True if there is a blank line before the location pointed to by - * trailer_block_start. - */ - int blank_line_before_trailer; - - /* - * Offsets to the trailer block start and end positions in the input - * string. If no trailer block is found, these are both set to the - * "true" end of the input (find_end_of_log_message()). - */ - size_t trailer_block_start, trailer_block_end; - - /* - * Array of trailers found. - */ - char **trailers; - size_t trailer_nr; -}; - /* * A list that represents newly-added trailers, such as those provided * with the --trailer command line option of git-interpret-trailers. -- 2.11.4.GIT