Hi Ingo -- On 8/15/2018 8:13 PM, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Hi Brian, > > Brian Callahan wrote on Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 04:29:52PM -0400: >> On 08/15/18 15:51, Ingo Schwarze wrote: >>> Anton Lindqvist wrote on Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 08:38:46PM +0200: >>>> This is an upcoming dependency for textproc/lowdown and also my first >>>> time porting a library(!). >>> While kristaps@ is famous for writing great code, he is also somewhat >>> well-known for declaring random fragments of his code as "libraries" >>> that probably shouldn't be public libraries. >>> >>> Is libdiff used by anything else besides lowdown? >>> >>> If not, should it maybe just be part of the lowdown port, >>> using two DISTFILES as explained in bsd.port.mk(5)? >>> >>> This would also have the advantage of avoiding installation of files >>> with excessively generic names like /usr/local/include/diff.h and >>> /usr/local/man/man3/diff.3. >>> >>> I'm not sure, if this question is too naive, i hope a real porter >>> will correct me. >> I would agree with your analysis. The only thing I would add is if >> kristaps@ is likely to use this code in other projects, to just go >> ahead and make the port now since it's small enough. >> >> Or maybe better yet, if he's not going to be using it for anything else, >> ask him to (re-include?) the libdiff stuff in lowdown. I don't use >> lowdown, so I'm not really sure if this libdiff library is old code >> that's being spun off into its own library or new code altogether. > I dug a little, and judging from Github, he took > > https://github.com/cubicdaiya/onp/tree/master/c > (ten-year old, unmaintained code by Tatsuhiko Kubo) > > in June 2018, adapted it to his own purposes, such that the result > is now 90% his code, and published the result as > > https://github.com/kristapsdz/libdiff/
Thanks for digging into this. > Obviously, he thinks someone (or he himself) might re-use it at some > point in the future, or he wouldn't have published it as a library. > Yet that might never happen, or happen many years from now (after > all, Kubo's code lay unused for a decade before Kristaps picked it up). While I trust that kristaps@ thinks that, I have absolutely seen libraries maintained as separate projects that were specifically made for a single project and not at all designed for re-use. Welcome to the wild world of ports :-) > It's totally unclear, and i doubt that anybody (even Kristaps > himself) can more than guess at this point. So far, it doesn't > even support building shared libraries upstream, and without > another user, there would be little point to that. Sure; when I said that, in my head I was thinking "if he is working on something right now that also uses the library then we should just port it." > I'd say, in such a situation, your call to guide Anton whether a > seperate port or inclusion into lowdown is better porting style... > > Yours, > Ingo (More for Anton) Doesn't hurt to ask to have the libdiff code put back into lowdown if it was indeed pulled out of it. If he says yes, great. If he says no, then we can revisit. ~Brian
